Hi,
The allocation policies do in fact have fatal flaws.
I believe it is acknowledged by (almost) everyone, including the people who run the registries (although I don't speak for any but APNIC), that the allocation policies we are using have flaws. They are a compromise based on the conflicting requirements of - conservation of routing table space - conservation the free pool of IP addresses - allocating address space to anyone who demands them and further, the registries are significantly constrained for various reasons from having any objective and/or verifiable measures in which to base allocations upon. It is due to the current state of affairs that an IETF working group to look at how to evolve the current address registry system was created. The working group (currently known as Internet address Registry Evolution, but due to the unfortunate confusion over what the term "registry" implies, will be changing (suggestions welcome)) will be meeting in San Jose on Dec. 9 at 7:30 PM and you can join the IRE mailing list (which is arguably a better place to raise these issues than nanog) by sending a message body of "subscribe" (I know you know how to do this... :-)) to ire-REQUEST@apnic.net (archives available at ftp://ftp.apnic.net/mailing-lists/ire). Regards, -drc