> with an active community that cares about
> standards,
Sometimes. And sometimes not so much. Compare Gecko and WebKit's CSS 2.1 support (based on the official test suite) at http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20110323/reports/results.html for example.
Or note the behavior of the editors of the Transitions and Animations spec drafts (who did nothing for a few years, until editors who were not associated with Apple took over the job).
The WebKit community has many members who deeply care about standards. How much the community overall and the project as a whole care is very variable.
> has an explicit policy of trying to behave like other
> browsers where possible
For various values of "possible". e.g. https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36084 is a long-unfixed spec-compat and other-browser-compat issue that's "impossible" to fix because there are Dashboard widgets and such depending on the current WebKit behavior.
> listens to feedback, and fixes bugs.
Unless it's inconvenient to one of Apple or Google to
do so, of course.
But yes, generally speaking it's a reasonably run development project, which means it listens to feedback and bugs generally get fixed eventually.
> They are the opposite of IE in those critical
> respects.
You must be thinking of IE6 circa 2004 or so, when there was no IE team.
The IE team did quite a bit of listening to feedback and fixing of bugs in the late 2000s, and is doing it again now that it exists again. Of course they're not fixing them in IE6 no more than WebKit is fixing bugs in whatever fork it is Android 2.2 is shipping. But you might want to take a look at IE9 and IE10 sometime if you haven't already.