As I get older, most of my thought processes these days start with "life's too short to dwell over the irrelevant". I didn't intentionally mean to pick on Christopher's issue to make this stand.
In the past, ALAC has indulged in this kind of mission-creep far too often and I confess to having been a part of that. We got way too deep into issues such as vertical integration, dot-brands and similar battles that have near-zero impact on end-users. In hindsight, I even think that the massive amount of work that ALAC did in promoting (new-gTLD) Applicant support -- an effort that I co-chaired -- was for the benefit of would-be registries and indirectly registrars, with little fallout beyond them.
It wasn't an Alt-Large issue.
I can bemoan the execution of the Applicant Support program but must now realize in hindsight that its failure really did not impact end-users one bit. Even had it succeeded, registrants would have benefited but the end-user impact would be negligible. Given the massive amount of person-hours spent on the program by myself, Avri, Tijani, Alice (from the GAC) and many others, this realization is disheartening. Others should learn from our errors and be encouraged to avoid similar paths of futile irrelevance.
As my penance I will do what I can going forward to repeat the end-user-relevance litmus test applied on currency-code TLDs to other ALAC issues and requests for comments, as they come forward. I invite others to be similarly vigilant.
At one time I recall that At-Large staff measured the success and effectiveness of ALAC by how many statements and comments it produced. That approach of measuring quantity rather than quality, in retrospect, was an awful mistake, and must be repudiated should it still exist(*). Let's be super selective in the topics of interest -- issues of trust, abuse, IDNs, access and safety, for example -- but do justice to them once identified.