> I don’t feel like “throw everyone in the same big box” is the solution

It has to be - while nobody needs more than a subset of that big box, the intersection of what everyone needs turns out to be throw everyone in the same big box. If you have anything less than that one big box you end up many standards and then everyone chooses which standard and in turn something important you need choose the other standard and you can't use it (ie the situation we are in now)

Of course making that "one standard to rule them all" easy enough to use is a hard problem. It may be itself impossible and thus everyone drops back to the current mess.