That's such an insightful observation, Annti! Connecting the technical choices and the non-technical goals is really important.

I have been told by many that standards are antithetical to this -- that formal specs should limit themselves to WHAT or HOW, but leave WHY for other documents. There may be some truth to this, but It really hard to work that way. The WHY still exists, but by omitting it from the spec, we promote a context-less evaluation of the spec...

I don't know how to fix this. Perhaps writing essays like this one is my clumsy way to think aloud about why a decision is or isn't justified -- and maybe specs should at least include footnotes to whatever public dialog informs their decisions?