I tend to agree the W3C is a bit pointy headed. Still, some kind of referee is needed to keep the browser-makers playing fair. Firefox's switch from RDF to JSON for bookmarks was anecdotal evidence that the RDF format was just too obtuse for a lot of practical use cases. Way back I tried modelling data in RDF; it was challenging and not well received internally. By comparison the JSON modelling I've done recently has been intuitive, easy, and well received. Although I used be be a big fan of RDF, its become a relic, and modelling relationships isn't so hard a problem that you need RDF to do it, IMHO.