Sometimes it's better to not be nice and just let reality finish the job. So much effort taken from people who clearly have better things to do...
DRM was pushed through despite objections: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/amid-unprecedented-con...
SVG was all but abandoned (the full story here: https://codepen.io/AmeliaBR/post/me-and-svg)
Transition costs are probably a factor: as long as the W3C exists and there are web developers who might think it is authoritative, browser vendors will get flack for deviations between browser behavior and W3C specs. If they abandoned W3C that would eventually taper off as people would come to disregard W3C, but it would take time. It's in the browser vendors interest to keep W3C standards as meaningful as possible until W3C gives up entirely, but their involvement makes it less likely that it will be abandoned even if it is largely superfluous.
WHATWG is very much a definition of a "de facto standard" [1] vs the W3C which is more a "de jure standard" [2]. There is a conflict between the two, yes, but both can reasonably exist.
In talking to teachers and web developers few know about the difference between the W3C and WHATWG. The W3C still has the mindshare lead.
Apple Google MS break them and and try to push for substandard specs pushed through W3C.
As a web developer for 11 years, I can state that web development is devolving to chaos of IE6 era.
When W3C allowed itself to be subverted and let big dotcom browsermakers to hijack the process.
A result of that is the continuous bloating of the acting web standard, when you have dozens of new abandonware APIs being showed into the spec on a whim, and no focus on things that should really matter.
It is 2018, and yet browser makers still have open CSS bugs from the previous decade that are banal to fix, yet all they care is how to stuff yet another API useless outside their own business setup.
The WHATWG doc is a fine standard, backed up by real implementations. Beyond that, W3C is just copy/pasting whatever WHATWG has every few months so what's the point?
And you really think the web is in chaos? We're at an incredible era of possibilities because browsers like Chrome constantly make progress instead of devolving into a bike-shedding argument for years. What APIs do you find so useless or abandoned and why can't you just not use them if so?
It sucks badly. To begin with, it can't be called a proper standard. It is in their terminology "a living standard" which means it being changed on a whim. It is not being written as an "ideal prototype", but rather it is just a codification of current behaviour of how Google's devs managed to write Chrome's DOM Api, with with all bugs and workarounds.
From standpoint of a person capable of high technical reasoning, this approach is bad.
And... I can't believe that whatWG specs are being written by people hired by Google for 100k+ a year, they are not done on a level of what an any much professional technical writer should work on.
Chrome has bugs, like any other implementation, but has moved the web forward greatly in the last decade and the vast majority of developers and end-users would rather have modern working tech than some idealistic document that doesn't go anywhere.
Again, since W3C just copies the WHATWG standard anyway, what is the value that you claim is being added? And if you have better ideas, why not just contribute them to WHATWG instead?
A standard is written and set in stone at least for 1-1.5 years. Official test suites are made.
Then, browsermakers make their stuff compliant.
APIs must support strict versioning. A user should not be bothered with "your browsers supports version 1 of method b, version 2 of method c, and does not support method d" it should either work with API version N or popup a big error message "API version N not supported, update your browser"
In the 1.5 years of wait time you mention, the current process will have standardized and released features across all browsers. The web has changed and nobody wants to wait years discussing something. Compatibility is not a major issue because features are rapidly updated and there are compatibility tables that will automatically reference and even build your app for you with the proper polyfills and transpilations.
Sure, sometimes there are bugs and partial features, but this is rare and there's no evidence that W3C prevented this since implementations are not up to them.
However the W3C has definitely failed to make any progress with HTML/XHTML. They failed with SVG. They failed with DRM by completely ignoring the issues raised and causing the EFF to leave. So please state exactly what the W3C has done better and where they have added value because as far as I can tell, they are just wasting time every few months from the very people who are trying to move the web forward.
This is a poor comparison. The problem of the IE6 and below era was that Microsoft was adding capabilities to IE without standardizing them. Now, browsers add non-standard capabilities to their browsers to trial their implementations (remember CSS gradients) but eventually move them through the standards bodies before formally declaring their support.
If you're using non-standard APIs, and they break for you before Recommendation, that's your own fault.