There's clearly an opportunity for a much longer talk, this teases that Paul (McKenney, of Linux fame) will have a very different take and we don't hear what it is, maybe that was presented at another session of this conference.

It's definitely true that translating into "standardese" is a bad idea. Humans don't read standardese and neither do machines, a machine readable model would be superior (more likely to be correct, more easily tested) for this and for other tricky technical problems. Given that even the for-profit C++ vendors don't use the actual ISO document (it's out of date and pointlessly expensive so why bother) having an appendix to the "draft" with the machine proofs would be much better.

I think Hans makes an understandable but (IMO) wrong assumption about a benefit from choosing Sequentially Consistent ordering (the C++ default) over caring which order is correct. Much of the tricky concurrent code non-experts are going to write against these APIs will be wrong anyway, even if you provide Sequential Consistency.

As a result the committee's original assumption wouldn't have much helped. For example I doubt that when (if? I don't like some of the noises I've been hearing) Microsoft fixes SRWLock the fix will be an ordering tweak.