WD08 (section 4.3) states that if no response is received from PUBLISH, PUBREL, SUBSCRIBE, UNSUBSCRIBE within a reasonable period of time then the sender may retry delivery.
This attempts to cater for unreliable TCP/IP networks. Since modern compliant TCP/IP networks should not lose packets, then the sender should not retry unless a network failure is detected.
The spec should be changed to reflect this and add non-normative content to describe the historical problem.