You make some good points. What I was trying to say is that even though there is the RFC, it's quite common to modify the alphabet or use other variants like Crockford's (mainly to avoid random profanity, e.g. in the URL identifiers).

When you see a Base64 string, you can be pretty certain that it's the standard version. With Base32, it's not obvious which variant was used.

Many languages don't provide a stdlib Base32 implementation (Ruby doesn't), but Base64 is pretty much always included. Maybe this influenced my perception of the lack of a universal standard.

Anyway, I should work on that section to communicate my point better.