Cranky,
Same as the story I got some years back about the myriad errors in simple English in the (then unified) middle school English textbooks. “A committee”, made up of “experts” (many full professors, the worst kind of expert!). No chance in heck. There was even a foreigner on the committee, so I was told, but couldn’t get anything done because he either couldn’t mention anything in front of the Experts, or the Experts knew the correct answer (which was not congruent with the opinion of hte Native English Speaker about basic English grammar).
Five competent foreigners could clean up all the Romanization on the island of Taiwan in a month given the authority to do so, using any system desired (but of course Hanyu Pinyin would be our choice). But it’ll never happen. 