I know that the Safari devs are unencumbered and disagree with the Google approach, but I don't know what position they do support as an alternative. I just know that their position does not coincide with Google's position.
TBH, there isn't a whole lot of diversity among those working in this space. There are a lot of developers working on graphics, rendering and layout. There are a lot of developers working on web standards. The intersection of those two groups if plotted as a Venn diagram, is pretty small. After all we really only have a few user agents out there: webkit (safari), blink (chrome), gecko (firefox), servo (?) and trident (internet explorer).
The web would benefit immensely from having many more of the devs in the former group involved. I personally would love to hear ideas and get contributions from developers that work on projects/technologies like qt and wpf.