I'll note that most of the behavior you describe here is deeply
rooted in the RFC's. The concepts of zone transfers for instance
are not unique to BIND, but rather in the definition of how
interoperable DNS is supposed to work.
That said, there is clearly room for improvement, and in fact there
are a lot of folks working on it. Indeed, some of them have funding
BIND 10, a ground-up rewrite of BIND that I think based on the tone
of your message may please you with the direction that it is going.
For more information...
http://www.isc.org/bind10
http://bind10.isc.org/
the documentation has some very glaring omissions like the structure of
the sqlite3 zone files.
--Curtis
