Unlike (FP)WD, CR(S or D), and RECs, Proposed Recommendations aren't long-lived stages on the Recommendation track.

They only exist for the purpose of supporting an AC Review about the transition from CR to REC. The Process explicitly disallows making substantive changes to Proposed RECs, and you need to cycle through more CRs (or WDs) if you want to change things.

It seems to me that we could do away with Proposed RECs, while keeping the associated AC Review. It would just apply to a CR instead of a PR. We'd still have an "AC Review to propose advancement to Recommendation", and it would still apply to a CR that has satisfied all the criteria for advancement, but we wouldn't need a distinct publication.

We have done similar things before:

• Registries go directly from Candidate Registry to Registry and there's no "Proposed Registry"
• Notes get elevated to Statement without going through a specially named publication to which the AC Review applies (and they still have a bunch of criteria to fulfill).
• We used to have a special kind of Working Draft distinctly identified as Last Call Working Draft about which WGs needed to demonstrate wide review, before advancing to CR or going back to regular Working Drafts. We've keep the wide review requirement, but discontinued the transitional LCWD stage.

This would allow us:

• to remove a little bit of publishing busy-work
• to simplify our terminology
• to simplify the Process:
  • by combining 6.3.9. Transitioning to Proposed Recommendation and https://www.w3.org/2023/Process-20231103/#transition-rec
  • by reducing the number of states and simplifying the REC track flow chart, which might make issues about improving tha diagram, like Diagram should clarify that it's possible to go from REC back to CR #775, REC track diagram does not reflect normative text #638, or Recommendation track diagram does not show Rec maintenance #596, more tractable
  • by allowing a number of minor simplifications in various sections of the process which would no longer need to consider Proposed REC distinctly.

Also, while I suppose we could deal with these two independently, I think it would make sense to also look into a similar merger of candidate ammendments with proposed amendments. This could be part of the simplification of .3.11.5. Incorporating Candidate Amendments requested in issues like #590, #589, or #700