"If I remember correctly, the majority of miners are warehouses large- Controlled by select groups and people who can afford to run the hardware required."

Technically anyone can participate. The richest have an advantage but that's in everything and Bitcoin is no different but as opposed to Fiat currencies the creation of new money isn't free.

"Even in POS (proof of stake), Those who were able to afford enough stake (in coins) from the beginning to qualify as a node holder are the only ones permitted to profit."

In some POS coin the requirement to mint new coin are negligeably low. The issue is that those node aren't specialized nodes but those nodes are the computers where the staking wallets are located. To keep the requirement low, the have to keep the number of transactions per seconds low. To operate a witness on Steem it currently takes more than 32G ram and around 512G ram for a full RPC node. These are the advantage of delegating the staking process, if everyone who owns Steem would have to operate one of these nodes Steem would be unsustainable because those nodes cost a lot of money. 

I love the strenghts you highlighted about DPOS!

"If you have money it's cool, but if you don't have money- it's still cool, as long as you want to do good for others."

Brilliant!