[p1mrx]

IPv4 allocated prefixes on 8-bit boundaries, so dotted decimal made sense at the time. CIDR in 1993 made the prefix boundaries arbitrary, which required "difficult" math to convert between binary and decimal.

So the point of hexadecimal is to make CIDR easier. Consider the sequence of 1s followed by 0s:

    dec: 0 128 192 224 240 248 252 254 255
    hex: 00 80 C0 E0 F0 F8 FC FE FF

Once you've adopted hex, dots become a problem: is "1.1.1.1.1.1.beef.de" a domain name or an IP address? Perhaps they could've chosen something other than :, but I'm not sure what. Maybe require every IPv6 address to contain .. somewhere?

I don't really have strong opinions on DHCP vs SLAAC.