Speaking for myself only...
The ALAC has a number of people on the CCWG itself, so in that that sense At-Large has been central to that very confrontation with the Board which you note.
But beyond that, what are your expectations? Fiery protest? An avalanche of advice statements? Caustic op-ed pieces in DomainIncite?
Speaking for nobody but myself ... an example of the complacency that bothers you ... I think there's some war-weariness settling in.
On the ground, very little that ALAC does seems to policy-wise have much real consequence. On an issue that (by name!) impacted our community the most in the TLD expansion -- Public Interest Commitments -- we were ignored before it was invented, and rebuffed after we complained that it did not serve its claimed purpose. This was serious enough that we called for a freeze of new gTLD deliveries, which led to a series of high-level discussions that .... burned a lot of volunteer time before being shut down with no change.
In essence we were powerless to affect even the facet of ICANN that most directly impacted end-users. What chance does it have elsewhere?
(In other words, from the PoV of end-user influence in ICANN policy, you can't get worse than powerless and we're already there.)
Compound this with the time demanded to understand the complex CCWG issues. But At-Large, almost by definition, is not comprised of policy wonks, but rather of casual participants to whom ICANN is just one small corridor inside the Internet Governance labyrinth. Very few At-Largers would call Internet Governance a profession, and have the time to completely follow a really archaic process such as the IANA handoff.
Meanwhile, there are other components of the labyrinth -- traffic blocking, site takedowns, zero-rating, RTBF -- that can make the fussing over domain names look trivial by comparison. ICANN attracts its level of attention because of the money floating around, not because its issues are the most critical to Internet users.
So... combine a sense that the public interest will continue to be ignored regardless of who oversees ICANN, together with these other factors, and perhaps the result is the seeming complacency that appears to irritate.
- Evan