> Someone, somewhere writing down a list and that list being blessed with the imprimatur of Academic Approval (TM)

One problem is that normal forms are underspecified even by the academy.

E.g., Millist W. Vincent "A corrected 5NF definition for relational database design" (1997) (!) shows that the traditional definition of 5NF was deficient. 5NF was introduced in 1979 (I was one year old then).

2NF and 3NF should basically be merged into BCNF, if I understand correctly, and treated like a general case (as per Darwen).

Also, the numeric sequence is not very useful because there are at least four non-numeric forms (https://andreipall.github.io/sql/database-normalization/).

Also, personally I think that 6NF should be foundational, but that's a separate matter.

"1979 (I was one year old then)."

Well, we are roughly the same age then. Our is a cynical generation.

"One problem is that normal forms are underspecified even by the academy."

The cynic in me would say they were doing their job by the example I gave, which is just to provide easy test answers, after which there wasn't much reason to iterate on them. I imagine waiving around normalization forms was a good gig for consultants in the 1980 but I bet even then the real practitioners had a skeptical, arm's length relationship with them.