Ripple has a large founder's stake meant to be used by the Ripple Foundation for development. Ripple has a decentralized consensus mechanism for transaction validation but it does not have proof-of-work. It is based on each network participant selecting a number of trusted nodes for each round of validation. The issuance of the XRP token is controlled by a smart contract. Each transaction burns a small amount of XRP.
The development of Ripple done by a single entity, Ripple Labs, founded by the founders of the Ripple Foundation.
There are elements of centralization and trust to Ripple and I guess a lot of people don't like it that the Ripple Foundation has entered partnerships with legacy financial institutions.
But each cryptocurrency can only ever meet two of the following goals: security, decentralization and throughput. Bitcoin is highly secure and decentralized but it has low throughput and thus space on its blockchain is expensive and the transactions are slow. You can safely park high value on Bitcoin and use it as collateral but not pay for coffee using the network. Ripple, in contrast, is a secure high-throughput network that has elements of trust and centralization built into it.
What about decentralized and high-throughput networks? An example would be a Proof-of-Work chain that where mining is easy and blocks are processed fast. The native coin of such a network could never achieve a high market cap because then it could easily be 51% attacked.
I don't think Ripple's deviation from the core tenets of decentralization and trustlessness are a problem at all if the network is used for frequent low-value transactions. I don't mind at all if my transaction is validated by validators that need to trust each other if I'm paying for a cup of coffee. I would be much more annoyed by having to wait for confirmations while my coffee is cooling down.
Would I want to invest large sums of money in XRP? Maybe as a speculative play. But not as a long-term investment.