Lol it's funny to summarize this discussion as: "we don't want to make a (seemingly) positive change because too many people rely on us to live in their 'backwards' ways".
What should be more damning, IMO, is that there are barely any grassroots or community members on WHATWG, who has acted like they are more important than W3C. Both have drafted and approved of things that have damaged the Web. I am looking forward to the inevitable protocol split between "linkable documents" and "apps in a common virtual machine". The complexity desired from web app authors is directly opposed to the sort of things that plain HTML and CSS were doing 15-20 years ago.
It'd be nice if Google and friends just worked on the app side of things, on their own protocol, instead of commandeering the Web.