Sean;
I think the IETF is valuable, but what do you tell investors when they ask what's in it for them?
You have no problem, because it is as good as ISO. Moverover, within NANOG context, it is better than ISO, because it is US-centric that 2 of 3 meetings in a year is held in US (remaining one often in CA).
If UUNET needs some operational feature in a protocol, they call up their Cisco engineer and say jump. Presto, in the next release train, feature X shows up. Who needs rough consensus?
Then, no one. In theory, internet/routing areas are the only area where so valued rough consensus and interoperability could be meaningful. Physical/datalink layer protocols are purely local. Transport/application layer protocols are chosen by the market, because of the end to end principle, Masataka Ohta