[superluserdo]

This very confident sentiment comes up in every comment section about IPV4/6

- "Updating the standard" is making a new protocol

- "forced suppliers to patch updates" - how?

- "USB backwards compatability that shiz. The fact I can take a modern usb device and plug it in a 1.1 gen port and it still just works. Why the hell isn't ipv4 like that for upgrades?" - because you're changing the address space of the protocol. If the new standard can address more than 2^32 things, then it won't be backwards compatible with v4.

- "Seriously is there any real technical hurdle why we didn't do it this way?" - Assuming you're talking about having a variable-length address from the start in IPV4, because I assume having a non-fixed packet header size would be much more computationally expensive and violate a lot of assumptions that you can make when the header is fixed (having a fixed region of the buffer that is known to always be the full header). You'd be much better having a fixed-length address that is enough to cover all possible nodes in the network - exactly what IPV6 has done.

- "Astounding they baked it in just xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" - IPV4 was first deployed in 1982. Wikipedia tells me that the year before, there were just over 200 nodes on the ARPANET. I think you're doing a bit of a disservice to the people who designed this stuff by castigating them for not factoring a 20'000'000x increase in network size into their protocol.