Apple staffs the WebKit team at a much lower level than other browser engine teams (which is not a critique of the engineers on the team; to a person they're brilliant!) It has gotten so bad that we're starting to re-invest in fixing some of the worst compatibility issues in WebKit...which, as you can imagine, is not where we'd like to be spending our limited resources.
It's hard to say what the intent is, but the effect of Apple's decisions haven't been great for us as a community.