And why is it so awful to add WebP to the list of image formats gif, jpg, png, but we can have a much longer list of supported audio codecs? What is different about audio? Or video for that matter? The argument seems rather arbitrary and self serving.
It's hardly a huge maintenance burden, all development is done upstream and there's an easy to use c library implementation, and of course it's fully open source and royalty free.
It's 2013, there are dozens of codecs, many open enough to be used, just flaming pick one.
There are lots of promising codecs that were proposed to be different. Wavelets used to get lots of hype too. It's a very risky bet to just punt for 3+ years on the hope that promising research will pan out into something viable.
Research projects shouldn't delay moving forward on stuff that's ready now.