alt Hacker NewsI don't think it's incoherent. On one extreme you have web standards, where it's now commonplace to not finalize standards until they're implemented in multiple major browser engines. Some web-adjacent IETF standards also work like this (WebTransport over HTTP3 is one I've been implementing recently).
I'm not saying cryptography should necessarily work this way, but it's not an unworkable policy to have multiple projects implement a draft before settling on a standard.
Look at the timeline for performant non-leaking implementations of Weierstrass curves. How long are you going to wait for these things to settle? I feel like there's also a hindsight bias that slips into a lot of this stuff.
Certainly, if you're going to do standards adoption by open competition the way NIST has done with AES, SHA3, and MLKEM, you're not going to be able to factor multiple major implementations into your process.