I just don't think Winer should be used as an authority for anything like this. What he pioneered was "just make it work for the user" solutions from a usability perspective, and not from an engineering perspective.

Winer part in the XML-RPC and SOAP outcomes was a source of misery for developers in the early part of this century. MORE was neat because it had a place on the Macintosh System 6 platform, when there was literally nothing else of its kind. What did MORE evolve into later? Nothing.

Winer has long been an advocate of "the semantic Web", which is a user-focused idea of what's essentially an engineering problem. The semantic Web was/is a dead-end and in its time it led to a great many stupid uses of HTTP.

Winer can be celebrated as an advocate for users but not as a great engineer.