I hope I don't offend anyone by saying this, but for certain things does 
it really matter what the standards dictate? We all know that standards 
are broken all the time. The problem is, in real world scenarios the 
more robust solution may not be the one that adheres to standards. 
Proper engineering has to take into account unexpected behavior. It's 
one thing to produce software that cooperates with other well behaving 
software, but that's only half of the story. I think the authors of mpd 
should consider this.