There's a lively discussion on LinkedIn (hiss, boo) on MISRA, the Power of Ten and other coding standards, along with why Ada is an unpopular language despite doing most of the recommended coding standards work for you and what elements of coding style guides should be standardized.
The consensus seems to be that not every rule out there applies in every situation. Which should be obvious. There has always been grumbling over poorly-written standards (eg: ISO 9000) and proprietary standards (as oxymoronic as it gets and a big reason the CCITT X protocols never took off despite being sufficiently good that most of us use at least one piece of software based on these pre-IETF documents at some point in the day over and above IETF equivalents).
The IETF has actually taken a lot of heat over questionable standards development, with accusations flying over pressure/corruption of the standards process by corporations and three letter agencies. The W3C hasn't fared much better, the original HTML 3 was replaced with a rather different HTML 3.1 to conform with what browser developers had been working on.
What we need, I suspect, is not a new standard, per se (see XKCD for details), but a new way to maintain them and a parametric way to obtain a suitable subset for any given piece of work of any given type.