It's literally the "Worse is Better" approach at play here. Yes, same one that OSS and the industry love so much, the same received wisdom that gave us Unix and C, and 40 years of them catching up to what Lisp Machines to do. Talk about a redemption arc.
But can't argue with success: MCP was obvious, skills even more so, but they did throw some half-written spec over the fence to stake the claim - and they were the first to have the right mix of technical simplicity, opennes, and marketing spend behind it, and it got instant adoption, and now we're stuck with the standard.
(The crown still goes to OpenAI though, for standardizing the conversational APIs.)
But can't argue with success: MCP was obvious, skills even more so, but they did throw some half-written spec over the fence to stake the claim - and they were the first to have the right mix of technical simplicity, opennes, and marketing spend behind it, and it got instant adoption, and now we're stuck with the standard.
(The crown still goes to OpenAI though, for standardizing the conversational APIs.)