Not implementing features is easy. Explaining your abstract minimalist reasoning to users who have legitimate needs for the features is the hard part.

Explaining/justifying the reasoning may be hard, but it's not abstract minimalist, is it? More like idealistic about open standards?

Well this is interesting: "I don't think those [SVG Standards] are good enough reasons on their own to make SVG Fonts an essential part of the Web platform."

That's not really what the sentence is saying - taking it out of context and quoting it here is a bit of a disservice.

Is it that far out of context? My reading of it was that he feels that SVG fonts is an unnecessary solution to a problem that is solved better by other options. Thus, he thinks that just because it's in the standard doesn't mean it's actually important.