Good practice with HTTP Request

Hi, I'm a brazilian web developer, and I don't know I'm sending this e-mail to the correct W3C's email account
If don't, please, forward to the correct account.

I'm web standard, always using w3c's recommendations
But I have a question, about http requests

We know it's a good practice to avoid so many http requests as possible, making the page faster to load
In the client side, most of the http requests is
CSS
ECMAscripts
inline images
CSS images
xml
Ajax requests

Nowadays recommendations:
Merge CSS and Script files as much as possible
Position Script files in bottom of HTML
Use CSS Sprite
Use Cache in Ajax requests
Cache CSS, Scripts and images with expiration date
Minify files

I don't consider these practices so good for the sites architeture and maintenance
Software engineering opposite many of theese practices, for example, instructing us to make components, which is not possible with merged files
Some points:
CSS Sprites is horrible for maintenance
There is no solution for inline html images
Difficult the use of components
Two version of the same file (normal / minifiied) prejudices the maintenance
Many classes (or functions) in one script file is also maintenance problem

So, after that all, my question is if W3C has a project to solve all this problems, without theese nowadays practices
The nearest project I've seen up to now is a Mozilla Project, described in this link: http://limi.net/articles/resource-packages
If it's already exists, I wan't to participate the developers forum discussion, if it's possible

I'm seeing Front-End walking to the opposite side of software engineering good practices.