They didn't get people to agree on terms up front, they made the final codec with interlocking patents embedded from hundreds of parties and made no attempt to avoid random outsider's patents and then once it was done tried to come to a licence agreement when every minor patent holder had an effective veto on the resulting pool. That's how you end up with multiple pools plus people who own patents and aren't members of any of the pools. It's ridiculous.
My minor conspiracy theory is that if you did it right, then you'd basically end up with something close to open source codecs as that's the best overall outcome.
Everyone benefits from only putting in freely available ideas. So if you want to gouge people with your patents you need to mess this up and "accidentally" create a patent mess.
You can say that, but this discussion is in response to the guy who started MPEG and later shut it down. I don't think he'd say its harsh.
As long as IP law continues in the same form, the alternative to that is completely closed agreements among major companies that will push their own proprietary formats and aggressively enforce their patents.
The fair world where everyone is free to create a new thing, improve upon the frontier codecs, and get a fair reward for their efforts, is simply a fantasy without patent law reform. In the current geopolitical climate, it's very very unlikely for nations where these developments traditionally happened, such as US and western Europe, to weaken their IP laws.