The more I think about this, the more I like the analogy: standards are like elections. I think you're right that most speakers don't think they own the standard, just as most voters don't think they own the machinery of elections. People can participate in the structure, or they can refuse to participate, not play by the rules, in which case their participation is ignored, delegitimized. But they can't change the structure: if you wanna play, it's house rules.

Unless, that is, by organizing massive, interstate and inter-district consensus, participants make that concerted effort to change the machinery. Until such a collective force is available, yeah, you would seem to throw away your vote. But: sometimes, albeit rarely, a collective movement does such work. So the question is, how do we get it to do the work of dismantling, changing, attenuating the injurious consequences of the linguistic standard?