Michael Shields wrote:

And at the time, there was continuous and IMHO justified complaining that they hadn't automated the process to make things faster.

Well, I can't dispute that "faster is better". However, I'd gladly live with slower domain transactions in exchange for some of the things that were lost with the advent of automated registration: - Checking for the existence of valid SOA records before a delegation was made. - At least some minimal validation that the registrant qualified for the TLD in which they were registering (ORG, EDU, or whatever). Of course, as was pointed out in private email earlier today, in a perfect world, we'd have rapid automatic processing AND enforcement of domain policies by the registry. Would be glad to trade further viewpoints off-list, since this thread is not all that operational.