>>Move to the country and be relatively free from dictators.<<
That is exactly what I did the same week I retired, moved to an 87-acre farm in an area where no one EVER messes with anyone else. One question I’ve not seen addressed is what’s to prevent homeowners from voting to dissolve unpopular HOAs?
"...why not vote to dissolve..."
A couple of things...
1. You know you are joining an HOA when you buy the house. It is in the disclosure documents when you close. It is VERY hard to form an HOA after the fact and equally hard to dissolve one.
2. I hated our HOA, so I got elected to the board to keep them from doing stupid things. Found out that most of the "stupid things" I thought the board was doing was part of the HOA docs and they had a legal responsibility to enforce the rules that are in place. You may not like someone telling you to pull your weeds, but someone else bought into the neighborhood because they wanted it to look nice and expect you (as a board member) to enforce the rules.
3. Out here neighborhoods without HOA's look like war zones. There are LARGE weeds in the gravel yards (very little grass in Rio Rancho), paint chipping off houses, cars on blocks in the driveways, dirt bikes and ATV parked in the front yard, etc., etc. If you want to live in a nice neighborhood, you go to one with an HOA.
4. And to your question about dissolving the HOA - most have a provision that the HOA can only be dissolved by an 80% vote of the residents in a PHYSICAL meeting. We have over 370 homes in our HOA and can barely get a dozen people to any of the open meetings, even when we mentioned raising the assessment. We weren't going to, but we needed community involvement in other areas, so we thought suggesting we were going to raise the assessment would get them to turn out in droves. It didn't.
So, my advice to anyone who lives in an HOA and hates it - join the board. It will be a learning experience.