I basically think it's unrealistic to expect the schedules to be posted
much earlier. Scheduling the rooms at an IETF meeting is a significant
exercise in constraint-matching with limited resources. If even a few
groups need to schedule a meeting, or change their room requirements close
to the meeting time, there is a significant chance that several other
meetings will have to change in order to accomodate that requirement.
Even if we could publish the schedule earlier, it would be a Bad Idea to
depend on meeting schedules not changing. It's not uncommon for meetings to
be cancelled, additional meetings to be scheduled, and for meetings to be
moved from one slot to another with short notice - all for good and valid
reasons.
Bottom line: If you schedule your travel around specific meeting times,
you do so at the risk of having to change your plans or miss the meeting.
We can't really solve this problem without either making the meetings
signifcantly less useful or significantly increasing meeting expenses.
Neither of these would be consistent with IETF's goals - or for that matter,
with the goals of attendees who want to reduce costs.
In my experience, almost all of the the useful work at IETF gets done
outside of the meetings. So showing up just before a meeting and leaving
just afterward seems unlikely to be an effective use of your resources.
Keith