No, they are helpful! Especially real-world benchmarks. Sure you can cook up utterly flawed benchmarks (like the one you pointed to), but that doesn't mean all benchmarks are unhelpful. A good engineer knows which benchmarks matter, which don't. You don't seem to be able to do that.
> If this were called HTTP/1.2 ...
The mere fact you brought this up (no amount of backpedalling you may do after my comment on this) makes your criticism look even stupider. You should judge the spec based on its technical content, not based on whatever arbitrary version number was assigned to it. Talk about a bike-shed argument (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law_of_triviality)