Job is definitely managing to make some great progress, which is impressive. There aren't a huge number of folks that have the time and effort that is required to push these things through.

I've worked for an operator all the time that I've been in the IETF, and its definitely pedantry, not-invented-here, and lack of understanding of real issues that prevents us making significant progress. I personally have had more than one go at trying to improve IETF<->operator communication, and made little to no progress.

A much more successful model has been writing code, co-developing it with other operators and vendors if possible, and then working directly with vendors to push their implementations. This model self-selects on solutions that are actually used (because there's non-standards-focused engineers involved), and rather than worrying about potential edge cases, get to handle the problems that occur in practice. This is a bit harder to do with changes that require global scope -- but all technologies we develop now need to coexist with legacy, so I'm not clear that it's not the best model as we go forward.