The cost of standards is very high, probably second to the cost of no standards!
Joking aside, I've seen this first thang when using things like ethernet/tcp to transfer huge amounts of data in hardware. The final encapsulation of the data is simple, but there are so many layers on top, and it adds huge overhead. Then stanrds have modes, and even if you use a subset the hardware must usually support all to be compliant, adding much most cost in hardware. A clean room design could save a lot of hardware power and area, but the loss of compatibility and interop would cost later in software.. hard problem to solve for sure.