1) Having virtual interims is a welcome development. My strong preference is for bi weekly virtual conference calls.
2) Limiting participation in virtual interims is not acceptable.
Unfortunately, there are some folk who imagine that short circuiting the IETF process to get the fastest result is the most efficient approach. And tit is if your only criteria is getting an RFC published.
The problem with that approach is that folk who were excluded from the discussions, who were told 'this is private, we don't have to listen to you' do not feel any inclination to use the result.
CBOR could very easily have adopted the approach of JSON-B in which the binary encoding is a superset of JSON. If that approach had been taken, there would have been no need for COSE since the mapping of JOSE to CBOR would have been fixed. I did in fact launch an appeal with the AD who ignored it.
It is bad enough when such design decisions are made in private groups who then come to IETF for blessing of what they cooked up among themselves. To have that happening in a WG would appear to completely negate the whole point of a WG which is to secure buy in for the final specification.
