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But why? It seems to be a decent format. And what's the other option?

Sure it's a decent format and it's quite widespread. However, if the committee decides to make the format worse by incorporating DRM, we can easily decide to move away from that format. Easier said than done, but still an option.

Or ... just not implement the DRM feature? After all, everyone from the OS on up is gonna have to agree to respect this JPEG DRM feature.

In fact, for it to work at all, it'll have to be implemented in hardware or hardware-equivalent software (i.e. not in Firefox or anything where you can dump RAM or modify the software).

PNG and WebP

FLIF is very promising too: http://flif.info/

FLIF is not really a format so much as an experiment. There isn't a spec that I can find, nor is there any sort of formal description of the format. Right now, the only available spec is the source code and that leaves a lot of open-ended questions about what to do about inconsistencies in implementations. I hope it develops into something good, but for now it doesn't seem a viable option.

If we're going to use WebP anyway, we might as well drop PNG too in favor of the lossless mode. I don't know of any downsides to this. But mandatory chroma subsampling means WebP can't completely replace JPEG.

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