The time spent doing such reviews was time taken away from other,
far more useful activities. If the IESG had the option of saying
"don't publish this as an RFC" and having it stick, then it
wouldn't have been necessary to take up so much time explaining
why bad ideas are bad.
Basic RFC rule: informational specs are published.
In fact, that's not the rule. The rule is closer to:
The RFC Editor decides, unless the document is approved by IESG.
Because the RFC Editor has always exercised some degree of
editorial control, and has never published any random document
that someone submitted.
And, by the way, there is no empirical basis for claiming that all that
IETF review produces a useful effect.
No, there's not - because you can't do a controlled experiment.
But the IETF's role (for better or worse) is to try to determine
the sense of a broad community about which proposals are good
and which aren't. you seem to want to have the IETF rubber stamp
proposals without any review. that would be diluting the value
of IETF's work, and there's simply no need for IETF to be doing that.
Keith