I refute your claim that NS was trying to support standards any more than IE was, and assert that they were trying harder to deviate from standards.
Netscape tried to push their own tag which was needed for overlapping elements in that browser (nothing else worked with z-index), a small violation of the HTML spec, and a huge violation of the CSS spec. They also didn't support any units except px, and sometimes %. Stylesheets wouldn't render at all if you turned off javascript. As others have said, it's an ugly horrible mess of a browser.
IE 5/6 were the best browsers at the time. The problem is when they ran out of competition they quit spending money, disbanded the IE team, and left things to stagnate for years - but without competition why would a company innovate? They are not a hacker group making the internet better for fun, they're a publicly traded company vying for the most market share.