Specs are not meant to be read by average developer. Average developer should read books. Specs are meant to clarify moot points between different implementations. Spec is like legal document, they are hard to read, but they serve their purpose.
I think this is actually fairly important for two reasons. The first is simply that unreadable specs are just as bug prone as unreadable code, but the second is that this increases the distance between the web as specced and the [much much much] larger developer community, and things like <img srcset> / <picture> show the benefit of having less of a communications chasm between those groups.
That doesn’t mean that specs can’t be precise but simply that good technical writing can accommodate a wide audience.
It would be a good exercise to require the public documentation parsable by humans. At least when it gets beyond the proposal stage.