I suspect the problem is as always, political. The standards committee is dominated by compiler vendors, who at this point are desperate to cast C in the dustbin of history, or at least put it in deep freeze, and are eager to push their other favoured languages like C#, C++ and so on. Therefore the committee has decided to please all parties by pleasing none, i.e., keep C stagnated, with only minimal changes that everyone manages to agree on, essentially relegated to embedded work and legacy code maintenance. And as long as C remains under ISO's grip, this won't change, sadly. C needs a rejuvenation and ISO is the last place to make it happen.