I think people need to remember that 'forks happen'. IETF has forked other standards bodies on quite a few occasions. Notably the WebPKI is built on PKIX, not X.509. If we are OK with that, we should be OK with other people forking our work. That doesn't seem to be the intention here but it is a possible outcome. The issue seems to be that they are sure other people will want to build on the CODEC but not precisely how it would modularize. At least not now. My concern is not so much version N versus version N', it is the question of what happens for version N+1. Do the forks continue or is one orphaned (like X.509v3). Another possibility to consider is that the group goes off and does its 'thing' and when it is ready, comes back with an update, supplement or whatever. That way we can merge the streams back into one at a later date (should that seem desirable).