Eventually, you come to realize - wait. We already have a very precise specification of how Bitcoin behaves. That specification has as much detail as you'd ever need, because it's written in C++ and executed directly by the CPU.
the Satoshi implementation is much much more than needed to describe the behavior crucial for consensus, worse it is a Spaghetti and gets extended with any feature the core dev team thinks fancy to ad. Just think of the latest UDP initiative of jgarzik. Satoshi client is a moving target to other implementations and even to itself as it evolves. Although it is standard by its number of installations, this does not seem to be able to hold, as requirements diverge with more advanced use. All major Bitcoin services use modifications of Satoshi, BitcoinJ (soon bitsofproof) or proprietary implementations of the protocol.
I plead for a standard defined by text, code examples and extensive set of tests. That standard should be derived and often purposefully extracted from Satoshi code but even future versions of Satoshi code should be measured on that testbed.
Wait - this is actually we move toward. The growing list of test cases passed by Satoshi, BitcoinJ and bitsofproof are the building blocks of that new standard!
And YES, the BF should use a lion share of its resources to define the standard set as its first goal at inception.
