I would expect the standards to grow as they take care to nail down more and more corner cases. I don't want to dismiss that: the "stupidity" I mentioned above

I would expect the standards to grow as they take care to nail down more and more corner cases. I don't want to dismiss that: the "stupidity" I mentioned above is largely about making wrong decisions about those corner cases. Indeed, I suspect if the right decisions had been made, the standard could have been shorter. Though perhaps only by a factor two.