I'm glad I'm not the only one ripping my hair out over this.

I wouldn't expect much to be done about this however. Of the concerns I listed in my blog post, I chose the absolute most conservative one, which could be added in a completely backwards compatible way such that no existing browser implementation would break, and I was basically told to wait for HTML 6.

For the curious: http://www.mail-archive.com/whatwg@lists.whatwg.org/msg18003...

Here's lookin at 2015.