I'd like to offer an analogy: fast food chain franchise vs boutique restaurants. It seems to me that your startup is a boutique restaurant and so is not a good fit for a McDonalds-style franchise contract. However, at the end of the day, running a boutique restaurant is a lot more satisfying, at least in my opinion, and most of the time, more financially rewarding too. On the other hand, you do need authenticity to be a successful boutique restaurant owner, not the attitude "we are disrupting XXX", "we are changing YYY, one ZZZ at a time".
What to make of Chipotle? They basically took the SF burrito joint from a boutique/local food dive to a viable biz franchise. Hugely successful at scale...