It sucks that the standard is so complex that a small number of design houses and consulting shops will end up with a de facto cartel of understanding the Sacred Knowledge, but nobody's stopping you coming up to speed by reading the whole spec and doing a lot of implementing. But it's not like you can build a solid TCP stack these days either simply by reading the original late 70s RFCs.

And you don't have to use this spec -- you can still use RS-449 if you think the USB spec has become overly complex. In fact I used that in a design only a few years ago!

I literally did this. It's called smoltcp (https://github.com/m-labs/smoltcp) and we use it in production as an lwIP replacement with great results.

‘You can and I have running code”.

This is why HN is great.

Then you can guarantee the project is small and haiku-like forever!

LWIP started off small, and it grew...

I don't think any TCP/IP implementation is going to be "haiku-like", the protocol stack is way too messy.

Having done the same, I agree completely

Before, I used to think that hardware specifications and protocols would be simpler purely because hardware people don't really like complexity and it would make implementation harder, and that was usually the case. Now it seems like elements of Enterprise Java have slowly creeped in...

The fact that the adapter has far more nonvolatile memory than it needs is somewhat unsettling, not just in the wasteful sense but also in the "hidden surveillance device" sense.

The spec includes cryptographic signatures for the whole signal chain for "authenticity".

http://www.siliconch.com/authentication.html

http://www.usb.org/developers/presentations/USB_DevDays_Taip...

In addition to preventing the use of third party power bricks, it also makes all of those USB-C docks with power passthrough useless.

A good idea is to not to let too many people on standard bodies.

Intel alone had more than enough clout to push the mass adoption.