I don't think UUNET considered it a waste. UUNET could not have grown as quickly as it did during the mid to late 90s without L2 (Frame and ATM) technologies. Fortunately for them, they did not have any pure IP only zealots that prevented the pragmatic use of other technologies in their networks. Otherwise they probably would not have been able to outrun the other ISPs.
UUNET received two benefits from it:
1. Speed, since at the time L2 switches were faster than routers, and 2. Traffic engineering, which saved them money in transport costs.
Point 1 is no longer valid. Point 2 is still valid.
UUNET built bigger and better networks at the time because of this. The market decided that UUNET was right. UUNET's shareholders were well rewarded because of what you called this "waste".
I guess the real question should be how much market cap did other companies lose because of certain people's zealotry? Any answers Vadim?
Diddn't PSInet deploy L2 switching massively throughout their network? What did the market decide about that? Could it be that UUNet's success was due to other factors? BTW, I'm not sure that #1 above was ever true in a large scale network. KL