Inability to move forward has less to do with IETF/RFC/public standards than it does with email and SMTP, to use your example, being heavily entrenched. Anyone

Inability to move forward has less to do with IETF/RFC/public standards than it does with email and SMTP, to use your example, being heavily entrenched. Anyone can come up with a new way of doing something, but it's a walled-garden until it's interoperable with other tooling that other people, everyone else, are using.