In a very real sense, we do not require IETF meeting scheduling requests to obligate the requests' organizers to get any productive work done. If we treated IETF meeting time as the scarce, valuable resource that it really is, we would almost certainly require more up-front and "objectives-based" planning. I suspect that would also lead to fewer meeting slots, which might allow for more time available to the groups that do want to have significant discussion.
[Merely observing, not proposing anything...]
If your last point is true, it suggests a model more like the W3C technical plenary, in which the general format is an all-day plenary in the middle of the week, preceded and followed by parallel 2-day (sometimes 1-day) working group sessions for those WGs with face-to-face work to conduct. Frequent coffee breaks and on-site lunches provide opportunity for informal cross-WG interactions. (This seems to work well for W3C, but that doesn't necessarily translate to IETF modi operandi, with their far grater emphasis on core business conducted in email.) The face-to-face meetings are commonly supported by IRC for recording and remote participants.
#g
------------ Graham Klyne For email: http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact
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