People are acting like Atwood and company are just trying to bring a little sanity to the project when it seems pretty clear (to me anyway) that it's really much closer to usurping the project entirely away from Gruber.
In computing,"Standard X" almost never means "The One True X", it generally means "the variant of X that implementations claiming to support Standard X are at least making some gestures in the direction of supporting, but which many of them still won't completely and which, for many practical uses, you'll need to go beyond anyway in manners specific to your application and the particular implementation you are using."
Further, he has dumped the project and appears to be completely uninterested in fixing, enhancing, or otherwise having much to do with it besides twitter spats.