New Year's Eve was also an odd choice for starting a last call.
Or a great choice if you want to shoehorn your wished spec into reality?
Maybe the W3C didn't want a repeat of what happened with XHTML2.
If memory serves there were a number of issues with XHTML2, chief among them being it didn't serve the original intent of XHTML very well. HTTP/2 has good meaning but some of the deign choices were made because Google wanted them not because they were necessarily best (at least from my understanding as an interested spectator).
Could you expand on that? Is there a list of these features, or at least a blogpost that interested parties could read to quickly get up to speed with the special interest influences currently observable in the spec?