Homeowners associations are abominations. They put "property value" above everything else to the point that you're not allowed to have the wrong brand of car or put your garbage out before midnight the night before it's collected. They should honestly be illegal.
"They" aren't som abstract entity, they're you and your neighbors. If you don't like the direction your homeowners association is going, why not join it and propose changes?
Making changes to an HOA, once it's established, is functionally impossible in many places due to the way they are set up. They require a certain percentage of homeowners to approve a change, which ends up being far more of them than you can get to respond to mailers or doorbells. The meetings of the HOAs themselves tend too often to devolve into wasting everyone's time on minor, petty differences about how to spend the dues.
This is at least partly intentional, I suspect, because it allows the city to make certain assumptions about newer neighborhoods which have these boilerplate HOAs that are essentially the same across a whole region. This type of thing may or may not be better in some situations than no HOA at all, but it undermines what I would consider true property ownership while also preventing any kind of effective adaptation to new information or circumstances over time. For example, I know of a neighborhood where they are required to put a certain color of asphalt shingles on their roofs when they need a new one (about every 10-15 years). Roof mounted solar panels or tiles will never be allowed in this neighborhood, which I find utterly insane.
If I was in a position to buy property, I would strongly favor a location unburdened by this kind of albatross.
Zoning is almost entirely a local affair, and it's city wide. HOA's are something I would personally stay far, far away from, but the amount of terrain they can effectively control is a small part of a city. I'd rather live in a more dynamic place with a few HOA's for people who want to live in a Rigidly Controlled Environment than what we have now, which is entire cities that are rigidly planned down to how many feet of front yard houses must have.
