For me, it wasn't a find. I was there. In the wars. The horrors I could tell you of the RCR Wars of ought-five… The find was merely providing a [citation] to my memory of the earlier process.
Seriously, problems around things like refinements aside, it seems to me that Ruby is progressing faster and more regularly than it has for years. Yes, it sometimes takes major alarmist posts by non-MRI implementers to get the attention of enough people to get a course adjusted (e.g., refinements), but I think that we're seeing much better collaboration and development on Ruby and more compatible Rubies than would be possible with the RCR mechanisms that were previously involved.
Imperfect, but by keeping to the tools that the main developers already use (email)…it is less problematic. I also think that it has helped that there have been implementor summits at several of the major conferences. Further, I think that it's helped that Matz himself is also working on an alternative implementation (mruby).
The communication is improving and Matz is onboard. I was really happy to see the IRC logs from December 10th. At least people are talking.
As mruby gains traction, people will want to know the differences between mruby and MRI. I think it's a perfect reason for Matz to be involved in RubySpec, and for an accessible language reference.
I hope the failure in 2003-2008 doesn't predetermine the outcome of such an effort in 2012, assuming such an effort does takes place.