alt Hacker NewsI've said this since time immemorial, and networking people often dismiss it. "Just use DNS," say people who have never actually worked netops or devops.
The length of the addresses and the clunky nature of their ASCII representation is absolutely the #1 reason the IPv6 has taken this long. User experience is the most powerful force affecting large scale adoption, and IPv6 has poor UX.
I think the UX is partly fixable by creating less horrible ASCII representation, but this would take a lot of coordination that was hard even back then and is virtually impossible now. If someone told me in 500 years we're still running dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 absolutely unchanged, I'd believe it.
Half the reason (literally) the address looks so bad is not because of IPv6 but because everyone keeps choosing to implement randomized in-subnet addresses and cycle through them for privacy reasons.
E.g. 2600:15a3:7020:4c51::52/64 is not too horrible but 2600:15a3:7020:4c51:3268:b4c4:dd7b:789/64 is a monster by unrelated intent of the client.