Not quite. It is more a matter of a standard only being useful if everyone does what it says. Picking a new location that no one currently uses is always the worst possible choice.
So are revolutions but those seem to work well on occasion. :-)
My argument is that those same Unix admins no doubt placed it there because it made functional sense at the time.
It is not a functional thing. It's a name.
A name is a way to for a person to remember an object or a concept. Names can then be arranged and organized. How names are organized is important in the context of how and where the users and admins interact with them. It may not make a functional difference to apache that the website resides in /srv/www instead of /var/www but it may matter to the admin that client facing data stays away from machine files.
Linus started out with the idea of emulating Solaris/SysVr4. If that's not what happened, it is a failing of Linux.
It didn't and I wouldn't call that a failing. Linux has outgrown it's original roots and is now a full fledged operating system competing with Unix.
Aren't all files 'client facing' if the machine has a purpose? What other reason would you have for any files?
How about performance logs, access logs, and audit logs? All of which are stuff you would put in /var and I'm sure we can agree you wouldn't want the client to see those until they've been processed. So not everything faces the client.
I agree with you on standardizing libraries but I fail to see how that has any relevance to where an admin should place their client facing files.
Standardizing libraries would be a functional reason to embrace the LSB. Otherwise it makes about as much sense as having a committee make up new names for your kids. If mount points and volume sizes were also standardized, it might be reasonable to standardize what goes where, but they aren't and shouldn't be because the machines will differ in size and purpose.
I don't think you're understanding my argument here. I'm not arguing against library standardization, in fact I'm for it, nor am I arguing about the purpose of the LSB. What I am trying to ask is what relevance does the LSB's existence and/or library standardization have to do with the FHS, and specifically the /srv folder? As far as I'm concerned the FHS could have been written by RedHat, IBM, or Oracle and would in no way impact discussing the relevance of the /srv folder.