Church polity? Beyond any essential theological elements, the form it best take, from time to time and/or place to place, in my view, requires prudential judgments. 

But that's not what I'm talking about. Arguably, the existing polity is well designed but poorly implemented. 

If the Magisterium, theologians and sensus laicorum would suitably interact in properly discerning the sensus fidelium over against the regnant hierarchicalism, clericalism, paternalism, sexism, employing more active listening and inductive processes ... polity considerations might not even arise.

When it comes to polity, in general, I'm no anti-elitist. Indeed, I've witnessed what can terribly go wrong when, for example, political parties eschew the use of superdelegates in the name of overidealized democratic processes, left to be run amok by insidious populist impulses, which then enable demagogic, authoritarian narcissists.