The other reason that people should "spend time reading broken W3C specs"
is that few of us really have the luxury of ignoring the downstream
implications of a spec that is widely supported by the major players. 
Whether or not one considers namespaces or XSDL types "broken", they've
created considerable challenges for almost everyone, and perhaps some of
these could have been avoided if more people "laid down in the road" and
demanded more implementation and interoperability experience before these
specs were made into Recommendations.