You're right, it's easy to imagine proposals far worse than OPOC, but ...
The OPOC proposal simply merges the existing Admin, Technical and Billing contacts into a single contact called the Operational Contact. Nothing more and nothing less.
Really? According to your slides from Sao Paulo, it also redacts most of the registrant info and adds yet to be defined hoops to jump through to get access to it.
There's no need to have three contact types in this day and age any more than its necessary to print my home phone number in this public directory.
I don't think combining the contacts was contentious. The issue was and is removing the useful into from public WHOIS. The reason this has gone nowhere is that all of the proposals have been purely worse than the status quo for the people who use WHOIS. If there were a reasonable tradeoff, e.g., redact some but verify it so once you get to the redacted stuff it's more likely to be right, there could be some productive negotiations. R's, John PS: I understand why registars are not thrilled about proposals that require more work on every registration.