Wouter, that might be a more pessimistic view than is necessary. If you go back and look at this post from Phill and the mini-thread that followed from it, there seemed to be some consensus that getting boats on the water was important before settling on all of the details of the class rule.

I'm not certain that everyone is on board with the need to converge eventually to just a single design, but I think there is at least some desire to reach consensus on a well defined set of rules that would allow the development of a single class.

Incidentally quite a few successful one design classes have gone through a period of prototyping and experimentation before full scale launch.

Mark.