Re: Mapping plan
"The people who devised IPv6 were NOT engineers"
Wrong. And they were very aware of KISS, which is for example why the IPv6 header has a simpler structure than the IPv4 header, and why the original transition model was pure dual stack.
Things got complicated largely because of reluctance in the industry to adopt this simple transition plan.
" direct mapping from the public IPv4 addresses to a (tiny) subset of the IPv6 addresses."
Naturally this model was considered (in 1994 or thereabouts). Also, to keep the ITU happy, a mapping to OSI addresses was considered (also in 1994). The trouble is, neither of those models actually works. It's truly absurd that in 2018, the ITU comes up with a naive idea that was ditched more than 20 years ago.
The good news is that nobody who makes their living out of IP service provision will waste any time on this nonsense. IPv6 works well already; just use it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
