several journalists, including LWN, fell into the same trap...

Reading between the lines the crown jewel of the ODF Foundation was an ODF import/export
filter for Office that:
— they didn't want to share with anyone else (wanted to make money out of it)
— plugged deep into MS Office internals (so pretty useless for anyone pushing alternative OSes
or office suites, and dependant on MS not locking these internals later)
— required changes in ODF specification (they got told in ODF TC meetings how to approximate
some ODF features in the internal Office model they discovered, but they wanted more than
that: limit ODF so current Office could handle it)

Basically they found themselves a sweet business model selling Office ODF addons as long as MS
tolerated them, proposed big changes that would have made their life easier at the expense of
limiting the ODF spec, and got predictably ignored by the MS competitors working in the ODF
TC.