Yes, I've heard from people working on standardisation that ODF itself is somewhat rudderless. MS has been reluctant in the past to support work OOXML but have recently really improved in this respect.
I agree with your assessment: lots of stuff works very well but there's a lot that the developers just don't care about. I work almost exclusively with XLSX so everytime I see worksheets set to 1024 x 1024 dimensions I know they're from LO. Sigh: it's an optional element so better left out altogether.
Coordinate systems in OOXML (used when positioning graphical objects) are a complete nightmare!
