Maybe not more ownership by the owner, but certainly more ownership by the user, which is what's important. If there are multiple blockchain-based alternatives, I can choose which one to resolve with; it's also essentially built-in namespacing (with each name marked with its resolver.) And although I'm personally very crypto-negative, a distributed ledger is exactly what I would want to make sure that any nodes that I use to resolve a name on a particular registry are trustworthy.

The throughput problem that poisons cryptocurrency becomes irrelevant when we're talking about something that's as naturally long-lived as domain names. Every domain blockchain can have its own gatekeeping process; one can sell names for thousands of $ each, and another can give away thousands for a $. They can require that domain owners have a camera pointed at them personally for 24-hours a day or be revoked, or they can hand out infinite names through a onion-routed API.