Far be it from me to get involved in a private pissing match, but... Owen wrote:
Perhaps we should ask IETF/IANA to allocate a group of protocol numbers to "the wild west". A protocol-number equivalent of RFC-1918 or private ASNs. You can use these for whatever you want, but so can anyone else and if you do, you do so at your own risk.
This won't entirely solve the problem, but at least it would provide some level of shield for protocol numbers that are registered to particular purposes through the IETF/IANA process.
Would that be 253 and 254 "Use for experimentation and testing" per RFC 3692? Of course, no-one like to see their pet protocol designated as an experiment (unless they really believe it is something that should be carefully researched and tried out in a controlled environment), but the garden-walling that you describe seems to fit exactly within the 3692 definitions. Adrian