In the early days of power distribution and use, it kind of HAD to start with generation, then distribution, then end user. It took a very long time for the system to develop into what we see today.
The difference today is that we can choose to have major changes at any point in the process from generation to distribution to end-uses. On the end-use side, it requires no government or political hurdles to start the process of creating DC system. I was always thinking that having 2 isolated 48VDC busses per house would be a good solution. Low power devices would be 48VDC and high power would be 96VDC. As for fuses and switches - the talk about relays and contact distance is simply non-sense. I have been designing and manufacturing eFuses and solid state DC switching for a while and its easy and cheap. You can fuse and switch very high current DC in solid state very reliably. Think of any SMPS topology - it is switching DC at hundreds of Khz or more 24/7/365. If you only need a light switch that will operate maybe a 100k cycles over decades, who cares? With 48VDC, most applications would not need galvanic isolation, but it is easy if you need to.
eFuses are the same thing, solid state and easy. Much easier than the mechanical breakers we use today. At household and most commercial current levels, switching and managing DC is easy. Look at the power levels seen in a Tesla car, there is not a single relay or breaker (there are fusible links for safety I think). They are dealing with high voltage and high current and switching it to a super high power vector drive to make the car faster than a Ferrari.
The reason I would want local household DC is for the ease and efficiency of distributed generation. Wind, solar, battery backup, etc are much easier to tie together when everything is DC. Local batteries charged by solar and wind can take peak loads off the grid and provide some level of backup in the event of grid failure. As for commercial use, I recently sold my CNC machine shop. We of course had a ton of high power motors up to 30HP - All of which ran off of HVDC around 320V. The air compressor, the CNC spindles, everything. There was not a single motor in the whole facility that ran off of AC directly. This includes the variable speed blowers on the HVAC system - HVDC also. We did not plan that, it's just the way it is.
As for utility scale generation and distribution, I have few opinions because I have no experience on what it takes to deal with long distance DC. I will say that if there is a push for big growth in local micro-generation, there will be a diminishing need for high-power centralized generation that needs to travel 100's or 1000's of Kms. I have enough sun exposure to generate about 60% of my electricity at my house. If all houses did that, the grid would have a lot of excess capacity. There is a large storage warehouse close to me that has a 1MW solar installation, but they only use about 25% of that. The rest is being pushed back out.
The simplicity and ubiquity of installed AC generation and distribution mean that it will be around for a very long time, but there is no reason the push for change can't start at the end-user side of the equation. Most of the changes would not need any real government or political permissions. The scale will tip at some point while people seek better (more efficient and reliable) solutions to energy needs. The interstate grid system will be around for a very long time, but if it is supplemented with new ideas and technology, it will never need to expand and the demand for it will slowly diminish.