Actually I think C emerged from its original ANSI standardisation process in much better shape than when it went it. You don't see too much K&R C being written these days for good reason.
Dennis Ritchie spend part of that time fighting against the introduction of several new features he felt were not the proper future of the language. Unfortunately, he had little to no involvement on the C99 standardization process. The final outcome was a butchered language. I'm sticking to C89/C90 on all my C development, no matter what.
"I was satisfied with the 1989/1990 ANSI/ISO standard. The new C99 standard is much bulkier, and though the committee has signaled that much of their time was spent in resisting feature-suggestions, there are still plenty of accepted ones to digest. I certainly don't desire additional ones, and the most obvious reaction is that I wish they had resisted more firmly." --dmr
The post you point at just talks at length about two features: const, which Dennis Ritchie liked but wanted changes to, and noalias, which he wanted to kill off. Const works exactly like he suggested; noalias became "restrict", which seems dead outside of a few standard library functions.
That doesn't seem to me like a pervasive sign of problems with C99. Personally, I find the C99 standard incredibly useful and I can hardly stand to write C code that can't rely on C99. I like having designated initializers. I like having a "bool" type. I like having structure literals, for use in arguments or return types. I like having the family of sized integer types, such as uint32_t and uint64_t. And I like having standardized versions of pre-existing features such as "long long", "inline", and variables declared in the middle of code.
