I'm aware of these factors, wasn't trying to suggest that the practice doesn't differ from the theory. What I was more going for was to highlight that the goal should be to primarily try and have these eventually converge, preferably sooner than later, not trying to strongarm the practice side and wait for the standards body in question to wake up one day and decide to amend the standard. That might give the impression of suddenness, but the core issue remains unsolved that way.

Usually when there's a high disparity between the "de jure" and the "de facto", it's due to a discrepancy in the interests and the leverage, resulting in a breakdown in communication and cooperation. Laying into either then is a bandaid attempt, not a solution. It's how either standard sprawl starts, or how standards bodies lose relevance.

Apart from colloquially considering standards not-necessarily-normative being, in my opinion, nonsensical (see below), to the best of my knowledge at the very least the STD subseries of IETF standards documents are normative in nature: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/std

> They are not the only tool, and they don't carry any moral force.

Indeed there are countless other standards bodies in the world also producing normative definitions for many things, so I'm definitely a bit confused why the focus on IETF specifically.

To be even more exact, I do not know of any standards bodies who would publish what they and the world consider as standards, that would be entirely, or at least primarily, informational rather than normative in nature. Like, do I know the word "standard" incorrectly? What even is a point of a standard, if it doesn't aim to control?