(speaking as someone who has built large ACLs/prefix-lists and has 6MB+ configs that can't be loaded on my routers. without vendor support those that want to do the right thing can't, so the game is lost).
I remember the days of making rtconfig work properly in various situations (heck, do people still use that? Does it even do IPv6 right?) and building router configs out of both public and private IRR data. Perhaps if the entry barrier to building dynamically generated router configurations were lowered significantly (to the point of it being free, GUI, and multi-platform) then it may be used for new network designs by people starting off. Getting Cisco/Juniper/etc to push -that- as part of their best practices for network design would be quite helpful. The problem isn't that the router config is too easy Jared, its that there's no nice and easy way of doing it right from scratch that matches the sort of newbie network operators that exist today. For examples of what "new school" netops are like, visit isp-* lists. There's a lot of clue there, its just "different" and "haven't learnt from the old school experience" clue, and its amusing/sad to watch people make the same mistakes you all did in the 90s. :) (Where's vijay now when science for generated network configurations is needed?) Make the public tools better. Push the tools as best practice. ADrian