What names or addresses things eventually map to should be fairly irrelevant in terms of perceived complexity, as you'd alias Joe Smith@whereever to some short version in your personal alias/nickname file anyway.
I think we're in violent agreement. My old arguments against explicit paths are starting to hold true for what we are currently calling "addresses". As I said in my last note, mapping of real-world objects to funny-world objects (that is, person/place names to host/network names) is a directory services problem and cannot be solved with DNS or anything like DNS. We've been getting away with using DNS because our total number of objects has been very small (70,000 .COM domains ain't nothin' in the real world.)
Or is that just mapping information for a data base supported translation server?
That's how X.500 planned to do it. I'm pretty sure the IETF has stuff going on in the directory services arena, perhaps someone on that WG could comment.