I'd loved to be in the room when those decisions were made. I can almost imagine some arbiter hearing the arguments from both sides, and then, to the horror of everyone, deciding that if they can't agree on a common value, they'll have to meet half-way.

OTOH, skimming the Wikipedia article, it seems to me that overhead in that system was proportional to message length, so perhaps length of 53 bytes was still meaningfully better than 64 bytes.