It also won't arrive optimistically until almost 2016, effectively making it dead in the water if H265 gets rolled out in every smartphone, or if WebM is everywhere.

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.