I guess it's more a recognition of the limited resources of both W3C and WHATWG, of the fact that there's a need for a "real" fixed-in-time and versioned docume

I guess it's more a recognition of the limited resources of both W3C and WHATWG, of the fact that there's a need for a "real" fixed-in-time and versioned document describing HTML rather than a collaboration workspace (WHATWG's "living standard") and W3C's choice to not die on the particular hill of redacting WHATWG texts. Though practically speaking, W3C HTML 5.2 (the last completed recommendation) was sponsored by The Paciello Group and MS before that, and with MS' withdrawal from browser development they also gave up redacting W3C HTML to fit IE's features set. I would love to be corrected by an insider, but that's what I could make up from publically available info.