Who do you think is in the standards groups? The browser makers. There isn't enough representation from the people who actually will be using these features, and it seems that even when those people can get a word in edgewise it is ignored.

> The developer community did everything asked of them. They followed procedure, they thoroughly discussed the options available. They were careful enough to consider what to do for browsers that wouldn’t support the element—a working polyfill is readily available. Their solution even emulates the existing standardized audio and video elements. Meanwhile an Apple representative writes one email about a new attribute that only partially solves the problem and the 5 days later it’s in the spec.

So yes, it appears that not only does the standards discussion start with working code, it ends with it.

In this case, the community group that was created did not include browser implementors or people who actively contribute to mainline HTML standards, and was not advertised on forums that they frequent. In light of this, their expectation that their proposal would be taken up wholesale was somewhat misguided.

Actually, that's one of the guiding design principles for the WHATWG: ease of implementation for a developer is supposed to trump ease of implementation for a vendor every single time. How hard a specific piece of the spec is to implement in a browser is supposed to matter less than how hard it is for a developer to implement that part of the spec in code and on down the line.

Unfortunately, the WHATWG seems to do whatever the heck it wants to most of the time and having an idea collaborated on by the development community (the <picture> element) or working code (the <time> element from that whole fiasco a few months back) doesn't seem to amount to much.