From a standards perspective keep in mind that http://www.stupi.se/Standards/100G-long-haul4.pdf is not approved - but we are working hard on it. OTOH having a reference implementation at hand, is an accelerator that helps a lot.
There is a whole industry that do not want it to be plug and play... (The ones that do not make routers or switches..)
Let me also add some color to your email as the current interoperability situation in WDM is quite funny. Sometimes transceivers of the same vendor can't talk to each other, as they are based on a different generation of ASICs and therefore FEC implementations. In other words, vendors typically have more than only one secret sauce they cook with, and different sauces do not blend well :-) . Perhaps transport folks are already too used to deal with such kind of issues that no one laments anymore. On the other hand perhaps, the networking industry is already so used to Ethernet where interopera bility is a no-brainer, that it is difficult to imagine what it means to deal with a technology that prevents multi-vendor interop.
All vendors have secret souce for 100G SD-FEC, and just the fact that you can wire the wire the differential encoding eight ways.. That;s why we settled on a HD-FEC that can be inside the DSP-Asic or inline after it. All to us known DSP implementations supports this with more, less or no extra logic. And the logic is free and fully documented.
To confirm your final point: Interoperability is on the top of the shopping lists for the networking industry.
Amen! -P