I believe the main problem with Pascal as a language is that there is no standard pascal. The last standard dates back to 1982 (or 1990 if you include a standard that went nowhere.)
There was an intent to update the standard in 1993, but there was a perceived lack of interest, so it never went any farther.
True (there was a technical committee), but I don't know if it was necessarily a lack of interest that a standard didn't come out, but maybe lack of
vendor buy-in as to what the committee was doing. For instance at that time Borland already had released Turbo Pascal 6, which had its own take on OOP. Think Pascal (popular back then) was in conflict over Apple's implementation of Object Pascal. The committee was proposing things like multiple inheritance, which can be very problematic. So what the committee was proposing might not have been something that various vendors wanted or they could have taken issue with it. I suppose more research on that has to be done for clarification.
http://www.pascal-central.com/OOE-stds.html#sect-6.3.2(Object-Oriented Extensions to Pascal, Technical Committee X3J9)
Some older ones, like the standards body of C and C++ have become self propelling entities, while some extremely languages like C# and Java remain one vendor only (with sometimes a few satellites), and it hasn't braked them one bit.
I also agree with Marcov, that people don't seem to get hot and bothered by C# and Java. C# was last "standardized" by the ISO in 2003. Appears Sun just said, "Screw it!", and went down their own path.
The bottom line is, there is no group of language experts dedicating time to improving and refining the language. What there is, is a company (a Borland descendant) which will add any quick gimmick they can think of in order to get money from their customers. That's no way of designing a programming language.
As for the direction that Borland/Embarcadero often goes down, I agree with you about "any quick gimmick they can think of in order to get money". Which sadly appears to degrade the quality of Delphi.
In regards to standardizing Object Pascal in these times, looks like a difficult hill. Each of the vendors are trying to differentiate their product in some way (for example Oxygene and PascalABC are dancing with .NET), so buy-in looks hard. I think one of the few ways to push buy-in would be to get Niklaus Wirth back involved, but he has diverted a lot of his attention elsewhere to his other "children" languages. Object Pascal was also conceived by Apple (look up Larry Tesler), with consolation from Wirth, but Apple passed the baton to Borland/Embarcadero. Which brings us right back to how would you get different vendors to support the standard.
Possibly another way forward is
through Free Pascal/Lazarus creating their own certification exams. It would do at least 3 things.
1) Help fund Free Pascal/Lazarus like books sales do.
2) Spark the interests of casuals, enthusiasts, students, and those wanting to make career changes.
3) Promote more Object Pascal awareness in the job and commercial market.
It can initially be something along the lines of what w3schools or the Embarcadero Delphi Certified Developer exam is doing. These are not exams done under a professional proctor (exception being Delphi Master Developer), but taken over the Internet from a web server. In the case of w3schools, they have a kind of "verifier", who is a person the exam taker submits as a witness or endorser (and their name is on the certificate). Embarcadero has 2 levels, regular developer and master developer. Level 1 is no professional proctor. Level 2 (master developer), must have a professional proctor, but appears to be a lot of hassle must be done to make arrangements. Probably either of these testing patterns (w3schools or Embarcadero), could initially work for the Free Pascal/Lazarus foundation. Maybe at some point, Embarcadero could join in with a vendor neutral Level 1 Object Pascal exam, then Level 2 could be more vendor specific.