'Open standard' has nothing about something being simple and straight forward. What CSS is trying to do is complicated because of a whole bunch of pragmatic reasons.

Last time a browser tried to 'move things forward', ngate aptly summed it up as

    Google breaks shit instead of doing anything right, as usual.
    Hackernews is instantly pissed off that it is even possible to
    question their heroes, and calls for the public execution of
    anyone who second-guesses the Chrome team