I have read through this thread, and you'll pardon me if it sounds like yet 
another rehash on yet another list. You might take a look at 
https://packetlife.net/blog/2010/oct/14/ipv4-exhaustion-what-about-class-e-addresses/,
 which responds to https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-wilson-class-e. 
I'm not sure what has changed in the past lotsa years other than which prefix 
people want to make essentially the same arguments about. My observation has 
been that people don't want to extend the life of IPv4 per se; people want to 
keep using it for another very short time interval and then blame someone else 
for the fact that the 32 bit integers are a finite set. 

That strikes me as crazy. Put all of the remaining IPv4 prefixes (for some 
suitable definition of "remaining") in a bucket, decide that if they were all 
made unicast IP address space that would add <mumble> microfortnights to the 
life of the IPv4 Internet, and think about what happens next. Immediately, we 
all go back to sleep, fail to update our applications and deployments, and when 
that time interval has expired, we all whine about the stupidity of the IPv4 
designers that didn't not make IPv4 forward compatible with *any*thing* - the 
next step has to be a replacement - and try to figure out a way to represent 
more than 2^32 interfaces in a single 32 bit number 
(https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-terrell-math-ipaddr-ipv4) or 
redesign the Internet in some way that would require as much effort and money 
to deploy as IPv6 has since its inception. 

If you don't think that's a true statement, I'd be very interested to hear what 
you think might be true. 

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