Fred> the most common hold-up that I see is a wait for normative
Fred> references. That held the MPLS documents up for a year.
This is not exactly true. In a number of cases, the documents were
explicitly crafted to have only non-normative references to internet-drafts,
but when the documents reached the RFC Editor's queue, all the references
were mysteriously declared to be normative. Questions about this mysterious
reinterpretation just went unanswered. My suspicion is that this has more
to do with the overload on the IESG members than anything else.
Another source of delay was the tendency of IESG comments to dribble in.
Just as the documents were about to be sent to the RFC editor, another IESG
member would have a comment. By and large, the IESG comments were very
reasonable, but for a long time it seemed like the review process would
never end. Again, overload on the IESG members is likely responsible for
this.