alt Hacker NewsIt's not that they loaded it up with features, it's that elegance was prized over practicality.
Simplifying address space assignment is a huge deal. IPv4+ allows the leaves of the network to adopt IPv4+ when it makes sense for them. They don't lose any investment in IPv4 address space, they don't have to upgrade to all IPv6 supporting hardware, there's no parallel configuration. You just support IPv4 on the terminals that want or need it, and on the network hardware when you upgrade. It's basically better NAT that eventually disappears and just becomes "routing".
> They don't lose any investment in IPv4 address space
What investment? IP addresses used to be free until we started running out, and I don't think anything of value would be lost for humanity as a whole if they became non-scarce again.
> they don't have to upgrade to all IPv6 supporting hardware
But they do, unless you're fine with maintaining an implicitly hierarchical network (or really two) forever.
> It's basically better NAT
How is it better? It also still requires NAT for every 4x host trying to reach a 4 only one, so it's exactly NAT.
> that eventually disappears
Driven by what mechanism?