We would be making much more progress on this argument if people stopped
taking extreme positions, and instead started to look for the middle
ground. There has been much suggested for the middle ground, but it is
getting ignored as the artillery continues to fly overhead.
I don't believe my position is extreme at all. Over the past 10+
years I have seen several attempts by individuals to introduce protocol
extensions that would fundamentally change some aspect of how
the protocol works, compromise security or privacy, or were so
poorly done as to degrade interoperability - often with some
"success". It's precisely because I've seen so many examples of
this, and I've seen the harm that it has done, that I've adopted
my position.
I have also tried to suggest a 'middle ground' which would allow
easier and faster registration of extensions while still providing
community review. While I'm not entirely comfortable with this
proposal, I do accept that it can take a long time to get an RFC
published, and that this can be a barrier to deployment of useful
new features. We've had some success with other 'expedited review'
processes for other kinds of protocol extensions (charsets,
content-types), and I what I proposed is similar to those mechanisms.
Keith