It is true, I feel pretty lonely in WG14 pushing these ideas sometimes. But it is not that we haven't made progress: When I joined there was only a vague understanding of of the memory model and provenance and even ideas how to make it less reliable in favor of optimization ("wobbly values") etc. We now a a good model for provenance, killed a lot of questionable ideas, strengthened semantics when there is UB (prior I/O is not affected), introduced checked arithmetic, started to eliminate UB from the language (this is ongoing but progressing well), made dependent array types a requirement with concrete plans to add a dependent structure type. On the compiler side tools are also evolving.