What struck me is how NONE of those challenges in doing IPv6 deployment in the field had anything to do with fending off attempts to make IPv4 better.
Let me say that again. Among all the reasons why IPv6 didn't take over the world, NONE of them is "because we spent all our time improving IPv4 standards instead".
I’ll somewhat call bullshit on this conclusion from the data available. True, none of the reasons directly claim “IPv6 isn’t good enough because we did X for v4 instead”, yet all of them in some way refer back to “insufficient resources to make this the top priority.” which means that any resources being dedicated to improving (or more accurately further band-aiding) IPv4 are effectively being taken away from solving the problems that exist with IPv6 pretty much by definition. So I will stand by my statement that if we put half of the effort that has been spent discussing these 16 relatively useless /8s that would not significantly improve the lifespan of IPv4 on resolving the barriers to deployment of IPv6, we would actually have a lot less need for IPv4 and a lot more deployment of IPv6 already. Owen