It feels like HTTP2 is a classic case of "something must be done, this is something, therefor it must be done". Clearly there are shortcomings in HTTP 1.1 which

It feels like HTTP2 is a classic case of "something must be done, this is something, therefor it must be done". Clearly there are shortcomings in HTTP 1.1 which would be nice to address. Google to their credit spent a lot of resources coming up with a solution which met their needs. The problem is that when Google then went to httpbis the people on the WG apparently took it as an imperative that _something_ must be released as HTTP2 in relatively short order. There was a halfhearted attempt to open things up to competing ideas, but unsurprisingly SPDY was by far the most mature of the proposals. Thus SPDY became the heir apparent to HTTP by default, despite being a mud ball of complexity and layering violations.