zlacker

>Standards bureaucracies like the Linux Foundation ... happily document and add to this sort of complexity without ever trying to understand why it was there in the first place.

That is because that is a standards organization's job. They exist to document what is actually being done, not editorialize about what should be done.

This seems to be a good example of the virtue of this sort of behaviour. The mostly arbitrary changes that have been done here have in themselves caused more problems and wasted effort than just keeping everything the same as it was.