[rdtsc]

> We're a small team, RHAT had 20 people working on this.

They should have realized they already failed when they allocated 20 people just do work on the protocol specification. This is another example of a design by committee done by a large enterprise vendor and how it results in a a bloated, inefficient and overly complicated specification.

All 20 people feel the need to justify their time by adding more crap and features to the design. Usually no matter how simple or complicated the actual protocol needs to be, its specification will always be proportional to the number of people * time assigned to work on it.