There have been countless attempts for unity of any kind of language in any field.
Not only in M42 lens mounts...
Think of Esperanto. An artificial language, put together from English, Spanish, French, and other European languages. It provided a simple grammatical structure, simple declinations of the verbs, no "weird" (historically grown) rules, and a very practical, easy to memorize vocabulary.
And it was a failure. Esperanto was an honorable attempt, but failed, because it was an artificial standard, that did not include what people need in a language, and what goes beyond communicating information.
Technical standards can and have repeatedly hampered technological development, and to claim otherwise is actually more ignorant than the insolence of ignoring Adobe's supremacy in the development of software standards.
If someone invented a standard camera companies could customize to their needs, it would stand a chance, and it may happen.
Any other standard, that does not find support, is per definitionem, artificial. Because it only acts like a standard, but isn't. Standards become standards through widespread acceptance, not by definition.