[im3w1l]

There are billions of users, probably 10's of millions of people of people writing html, 10s of thousands of implementers and 100s of designers.

A tiny improvement for a huge group can outweigh many drawbacks for a smaller one.

[lolinder]

But when designing a standard, if you ignore the needs of implementers you can accidentally write yourself into a place where it becomes impossible for new implementers to completely implement the spec, so we're locked to our existing implementations.

I don't think that HTML has this problem so much, but it's absolutely an issue with both CSS and JavaScript.

[nazgul17]

It's probably right in this context, but I'd be careful with the last part in general contexts: assuming utility is linear makes for easy reasoning but also would say that a mild stomach ache for every single human (i.e. 7*10⁹ stomach aches) is worth more than the life of someone.