Most (if not all) people on the committees don't like the paywall. The accountants have to explain every couple years why its necessary. Then people seem to forget and we have to do it all over again. It's cyclical.
But other standards organisations do just fine providing free standards, including fairly large and complex standards, so it doesn't seem particularly necessary at all. Hell, some ISO standards are freely available, presumably because standards that don't get implemented due to lack of access are kind of useless.
