The IETF's standardisation process almost can't help but improve whatever it is you're trying to standardize. Not only are you being shepherded by peers with expertise in whatever corner of networking you're excited about (the Area Directors for whichever Area your Working Group was assigned to) but you're obliged to put up with anyone who cares to offer an opinion mailing it in. Looking for consensus isn't a good way to run a restaurant kitchen, but it may be the best possible way to agree network standards. Even when contributors say something you believe to be completely stupid figuring out how to put into words exactly why they're wrong is likely to be instructive, and as often as not they're not /quite/ as wrong as you first thought.
For example the TLS Working Group is polishing up a document telling people to cut it out with the TLS 1.0 after all these years and get to something at least vaguely modern like ten year old TLS 1.2 instead, (once upon a time named the diediedie draft, these days it has a more respectable name). Martin Rex offered the opinion that TLS 1.2 is _worse_ than TLS 1.0 and 1.1 because it doesn't smash SHA1 and MD5 together to produce a single hash. He reasons that if, somehow, SHA1 is broken enough to allow a preimage attack, TLS 1.0 is fine, whereas TLS 1.2 with SHA1 is now broken.
Of course people said Martin is barking up the wrong tree. But much more importantly they took another look at their document, it didn't actually _say_ you should implement SHA-256 when you upgrade to TLS 1.2, but they all agreed you should do that, so probably the document wants to spell that out...