Re: Getting more peopel to adopt IPv6
To my understanding radvd still requires the systems ask for new IPs when a change occurs. In an IPv4 world, I never have to have my internal systems change anything, ask for a change, restart, hup or whatever. The external IP changes but the internal IP stays the same. Everything behind the firewall continues to work *exactly* as it was before, with zero administration. All that changes is the edge device (which picks up that the IP address changeover has occurred) and DNS (driven dynamically by the edge device.)
Now, I could try mucking about with prefix validity lifetimes, but then I'm still changing the IP address that the applications on that system see. There's all sorts of applications that need restarts to handle address changes and that's very, very bad.
The solution, of course is using ULAs with 1:1 NPTv6 or Map66 at the edge.
Ivory tower types my not like that we all have 30+ years of legacy cruft to drag around, but fuck them in the face with a rototiller. I couldn't care less. We do have 30+ years of legacy cruft and that isn't going away.
Applications don't like having their IP addresses changed. That means that you either have to set up the application for all possible IP addresses (and defend all possible IP addresses) before the app starts. Frankly, this is often not possible in cases where you are trunking in a second ISP to handle load changes or ahead of a known outage/changing contracts/etc.
Alternately, you have to restart your apps every time a change occurs. That's just flat out unacceptable.
Radvd doesn't solve these problems. All it can let you do is assign new global IPs to your systems when a change occurs, assuming that the stars align right and the things actually handle multi-IP stacks properly, actually honour route expiration and so forth.
Load balancing, as you said, requires NAT. I don't think the future is overloading NAT as we have in the IPv4 world, unless you live in Canada where the ISPs are douchecanoes that don't hand out prefixes. (May they burn in the eternal fires of their own greed.)
At a minimum you are going to do 1:1 prefix translation NAT to get proper load balancing, which is exactly what I use and advocate, and something that makes the ivory tower nerds' heads explode in an ideological rage.
To them, end-to-end is a religious concept that takes precedence over ease of use, profitability, manageability and even common sense. They will attack your professionalism, question your parentage and I wouldn't be surprised if they'd just shank you in the street with a sharpened toothbrush for having the temerity to suggest that "horrible internet breaking kludges" like 1:1 prefix NATing are required in the real world.
I can't stand those fascist wastes of carbon. I would not shed a tear if each and every last one of them get cholera and shit themselves to death. We wouldn't be in this mess, requiring "kludges" like prefix NAT if they had removed head from sphincter at any point in the multi-decade development of the IPv6 protocol to acknowledge the actual functional reality of the world in which the protocol - and the applications that use it - must actually function.
The network will adapt to serve the needs of the applications that make the business money. The business will not adapt to serve the desires of the people designing the protocol. That's life, and the ivory tower types need to fucking deal with it.