I think Melvin may be too used to the W3C world where the spec is the only thing that matters and people write tons of specs and then 99% of them are never implemented but they still talk about the specs and spec authors with religious respect and ceremony -- so he thinks the NIPs repo is a very powerful entity.

In fact the NIPs repo is constantly running behind implementations and trying to stay relevant in a chaotic scenario of 32 different clients each with their own priorities.