For instance, we know Bp Iker made an approach to Cardinal Law in 2006, but by 2008, he and his diocese had decided to affiliate with the Southern Cone. That says to me that there must have been additional approaches to other jurisdictions as well as to conservative TEC bishops like Schofield and Duncan before Iker settled on a final course that definitely did not involve Rome. (It's hard to avoid the conclusion, though, that Rome never took the 2006 Iker approach seriously, having already placed its bets on Steenson.)
However, we also know that there was a Catholic faction among Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth clergy that went so far as to approach Bp Vann in 2008, and although they must have been fully aware of their bishop's and the diocese's direction, they nevertheless told Vann that the diocese was overwhelmingly in favor of becoming Catholic. The reaction from the diocese on receiving this news should not have come as a surprise. The surprise to me is that Hough III kept his job as canon to the ordinary.
This makes me wonder if the Catholic faction, the Fort Worth Four and the others who went into the Ordinariate in 2012, had enough power in the diocese to counterbalance Iker -- he apparently couldn't get rid of them, but he was happy to see them go. Indeed, he may have permitted the 2008 approach to Vann in hopes that this group would discredit themselves, but he couldn't dislodge them even then, and he even had to keep Hough III. Still, the Vann approach had been a Hail Mary play that didn't work, and it offers an insight into the general capabilities of Hough III and the rest of the clique.
I would assume that after the Fort Worth Four affair blew over by early 2009, Steenson was back in the US, and it was possible to make the outlines of Anglicanorum coetibus and his planned role known to a select group of Fort Worth misfits, who now probably included Steenson among them. The group drew in others like Fr Scott Hurd, a former Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth priest and Nashotah House alumnus, now a Pastoral Provision priest working for Cardinal Wuerl in Washington, who would become the delegate for implementing Anglicanorum coetibus. Andrew Bartus, a couple of years younger than Charles Hough IV, seems to have overlapped Hough IV at both Texas A&M and Nashotah House and seems to have become a serious member of the clique as well.
The impression I get, though, is that all the members of this clique, from Steenson on down, were bumblers. They had a minimal instinct for self-promotion, which brought them to levels of incompetence at which they didn't last. Steenson lasted two years as Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande, and I have a nagging feeling that even had he not resigned to go to Rome, he'd have been out soon enough. He lasted four years as ordinary of the OCSP, "retiring" at 63 and eased out of Houston. I suspect he wouldn't have lasted any longer if he'd stayed in New Mexico. Hough III, somehow able to hang on under Iker, was out within months of losing Steenson's protection.
Their legacy is a sad one.
