Would it have been less disruptive in May? It's very clear that Apple's participation would have been preferable, but is there any other way this would have gone down even with it?
(Your posts have been much more informative than the submission, thank you.)
The outcome of this process is still unknown -- the patents might be found not to apply, or acceptable licensing terms may yet be worked out. But, if not, then we may need to change the specification. That could mean minor tweaks or it could mean developing new APIs from scratch.
If the disclosure came six months earlier, then there's the potential that it could have saved us six months of work writing and implementing specs that might now be abandoned. We could also be well on the way to developing and standardizing the replacement API (if one turned out to be necessary).
(Your posts have been much more informative than the submission, thank you.)