@ian - I genuinely share your frustrations and you aren’t the first. My belief is that this stems from the history in buildingSMART.
In the words of @jwouellette, the ISG has traditionally been a refuge of the “big” international vendors. buildingSMART historically made decisions behind closed doors, which in my opinion has been the single biggest hindrance towards the adoption of OpenBIM. BCF has been much more successful in a shorter time period, with the support of an ecosystem, without the big vendors involvement.
A good example of this is how one year ago, I noticed that the documentation for generating an IFC GlobalId did not match the algorithm - a fundamental error. After a month of discussion (and agreement that it was wrong), nothing happened, and nobody bothered to return to it after a 4 month reminder and even after it was highlighted as a source of error. Yet another reminder 3 weeks ago revived the discussion, but still, there are no changes, even though the change is fairly trivial and the documentation wording was spelled out explicitly and agreed with an MSG member.
I am still waiting for the GlobalId documentation to be fixed. Note that this fix doesn’t consider another point I brought up a year ago about how the randomness was not specified, meaning that if a digital twin of a city should be created, ID collisions could occur. This point was ignored. GlobalIds are one of the most fundamental aspects of IFC and it is sad to see it given so little attention. For this reason Revit models --which provide sequential IDs-- are useless for us and we have to re-generate all of the IDs.
See another problem only fixed one year later, seemingly by coincidence, not because the issue was recognised on the forum.
Your problem with materials in general has come up before, and again, and yet again, and still again, and I suspect it will come up in the future by another.
There are many, other, examples, but you get the idea.
What this demonstrates, is that although there are clearly qualified technical individuals browsing this forum, is that there is a breakdown in process between technical discussion happening on this forum and actual implementation in the specification. Just like the GlobalId fix is simple, fixing colours is also relatively simple by adding a few sentences to the documentation describing the order of precedence - and the implementer agreement can be removed. There are a few examples on this forum where a mistake or issue has translated into an actual implementation, but they are few and far between. This is a cultural problem.
To be taken seriously by buildingSMART currently requires a paywall membership to the local chapter, self-funding for flights and accommodation for international meetings, and a ballpark figure of ~50,000USD for software certification, of which a publicly available open-source unit test suite could solve half the implementation problems. As a result, we have removed the requirement for buildingSMART certified software in contracts as they no longer are indicative of the quality of data and authoring capabilities. We are also having to produce documentation of all of the known workarounds for these certified software.
That said, I believe things are changing slowly for the better.
The first evidence is this forum’s existence, which previously didn’t exist, despite buildingSMART being around for a while. Also, this which was fixed, although it did take one year. This initiative for a community meeting, which although the first one was cancelled, might happen next month. In addition, @jonm’s work on moving IFC to Git, so that others could theoretically contribute - though the branching is confusing and I have been told that PRs for only minor wording are currently allowed. I have proposed a Free and Open-Source buildingSMART chapter to help open up buildingSMART to the community, but we will see is it is currently on hold, hoping that the community meetings fill this gap.
Please stay active in the forums and help demonstrate to buildingSMART that the community is out there and can make a difference. Please join in the community meeting initiative when it supposedly happens in Feb, and please voice your concerns. I hope we can change things.
buildingSMART still has far to go to increase in transparency. MSG/ISG members should take notice of the forums more and actually propagate suggestions to schema changes, rather than this being a black hole of technical discussion. Expert groups should hold all meetings publicly and give an outlet for the community to voice their concerns.
I understand that there is a rigorous process behind ISO and certification, and these are no doubt good things and do require a hand of authority and selection behind it. However, this process is not mutually exclusive with community outreach and transparency.