You seem to want some kind of a hidden technocracy where what the (ignorant and confused) voters say they want doesn't matter much.

This is how most of the First World is run. I think Belgium's 589 days without an elected government, during which Belgium was not much misgoverned at all, provide a nice natural experiment demonstrating this. To quote the blogger Foseti:

The odd thing about this period of no government was that Belgium’s government was very busy. For example, the non-government nationalized one of the country’s largest banks. Less importantly, your humble blogger had numerous meetings that were attended by representatives of Belgium’s non-government.

It isn't great but I expect it outperforms popular input. In the third world in particular, experiments with having popular input into actual governance seem to end badly, though I am the first to admit there are important confounding variables.

When it comes to managing cities, the more technocratic the city is the more prosperous it tends to be, now of course correlation isn't causation, but overall I'd rather live in a prosperous city than a non-technocratic one, and if something can scale for cities with millions of inhabitants, why not small countries?

Most people wouldn't call the result a democracy.

Except most people do. And the case can be made it is a democracy in the same sense say Sweden is a monarchy.