@nprofile1q... Usually I am the biggest proponent of it being the worst idea ever to demand everyone rip up everything everywhere that exists and completely recreate it from scratch. But I think the crackpot "IPv4 compatible" extensions published as bootleg RFCs sorta indicate that it was really the only way in terms of actually creating an improved standard, with the only other option being brute forcing sticking with IPv4.

And while I think IPv6 is the right call, it definitely has demonstrated why "throw away literally everything that exists and redo it from scratch" is a terrible idea (see also: French decimal time, etc. etc.), considering that for IPv6 the only affect on most applications is literally just "hand the OS a slightly bigger address struct" and "be able to parse/serialize a second IP format" (there's a lot more required for NICs and routers and OSes and such to support it ofc, but unless you have 25 year old hardware it's been supported in basically all of those so not an excuse)