Either Dave Winer is extraordinarily pig headed, or he just can't read with comprehension. It's definitely one of those two though. The RSS advisory board (public mailing list here) wants to get a handful of currently ambiguous things in the spec nailed down. It's not a long list, and the idea isn't to invent anything new. Here's what's being discussed:

• How many enclosures can an item have? It looks like only one, but it's not entirely clear. What's being asked for: clarification, not new capabilities
• What kind of data can appear in the description tag? HTML? Escaped HTML? XHTML? Plain Text? How are consumers of the data supposed to know? Again, what's needed is clarification, not new capabilities.
• Can HTML appear in any other items? Like the title?

This effort is pretty small beans, actually. No one is out to redefine RSS, or make massive changes. What's happening is an effort to nail down areas that could use nailing down. Winer's response to all this? Change the subject to how much money has been invested in RSS (irrelevant) and whine:

And why should we care? Well I care because it would help to explain to my colleagues in the XML world why it isn’t so easy to reinvent RSS. Do the math. Let’s say the actual number is, for the sake of argument, $8.2 billion. What does that look like?

back when I worked at ObjectShare (before Cincom bought the Smalltalk business), I had a manager who was fond of remarking on situations like this as follows:

"Either I've got s*** in my mouth, or you've got s*** in your ears"

What we seem to have here is an ear problem. Maybe we all need to use smaller words or something.