Dustin, I totally agree with you that the current system is whack. Glacial adoption of W3C standards has a real cost on developers and users, and ends up with rounded corners taking 16 lines of CSS, and gradient fills taking 8.

I don't think that we'll be better off just by making the current process "go faster," though.

There needs to be some proper vetting of features. You'd want to avoid the tyranny of the monied interests. It can't just be Apple/Microsoft/Google making the decisions about what goes in and what doesn't -- even though they're going to shoulder the cost on the user-agent side to implement the feature.

It might just be as simple as leaving the current ecosystem as it is, looking at the adoption rate and success of a given construct, and folding those into the "living" spec (without the prefix, of course) -- and just do this process on a regular, fairly frequent interval, like every 6 months.