Remembering the Future

Nearly every element in Atom is already contained in one of the DC specs. I took the time to compare the Atom elements with their DC equivalents and found something quite interesting: when you remove the overlap with Dublin Core what's left is pure syndication.

The only elements that don't have obvious conterparts in DC are those that deal with the syndication aspect of Atom, and to be honest there aren't many of them: atom:feed, atom:info, atom:entry, atom:link, atom:content. So my question is this: why isn't Atom defining a Syndication Element Set as a complement to the Dublin Core Element Set? Why duplicate all that effort when the Dublin Core people have been over the issues again and again for nine years? There are many people that I know are intimately familiar with Dublin Core who are involved in the syntax effort so why aren't these elements being used. Is it NIH or something else?