At the risk of bucketing myself as a crackpot: I'm actually not a big fan of IPv6 either. I don't believe that in 50 years anyone is going to care what an IP address is; we'll have long since built new overlays on top of whatever transports we come up with, and IP will be an archeological curiosity.

The network should be dumb; it's the endpoints that need to be smart.

I agree completely about the dumb network. Security, in particular, lives in the endpoints.

But still, net-boot BIOSes and BOOTP/DHCP protocols have been around since 1985 (RFC 951). They show no signs of going away. Possibly the problem of bootstrapping the configuration and security relationships will be with us as long as there are security boundaries on the networks.

And there will be security boundaries on networks as long as there are mediated boundaries in the real world.