Google fucked it because they wanted the control. They could have easily made the spec just "here's the subset of crap you can use, and here's the extra rules"

Google fucked it because they wanted the control. They could have easily made the spec just "here's the subset of crap you can use, and here's the extra rules" and left it at that, but they just had to add all of the other nonsense to give themselves control. Without that it would have been fine. They could have still added in the part where they give pagerank bonuses to sites that comply, so there'd be an enforcement mechanism too.