Emacs and changing documentation formats

esr has a tendency to do this sort of thing, sometimes successfully, sometimes not (although even his failures tend to generate a lot of useful discussion and leave things better, remember Aunt Tillie and kernel configuration for one of the early examples??)

Given that the topics he tends to tackle are hard and tailor made for bikeshed arguments, I'm not sure that any approach is going to be easy. At least with his approach, nobody ends up feeling that a big change was secretly put in or that they thought he was working on one thing and feel ambushed because the end result was something different. His approach virtually guarantees that anyone who cares and is even casually watching the project will hear about it and have a chance to be part of the debate early on.

He also does take feedback and adjust his approach (to a large extent anyway :-)

He also avoids the "this is what someone else should do" trap, he goes in with the "this is what should change, and I am willing to write the tools to change it" approach instead.