You've actually hit upon (part of) the answer right there. While IPv4 was designed around the (then) new 32 bit processors of the day, the committee that came u

You've actually hit upon (part of) the answer right there. While IPv4 was designed around the (then) new 32 bit processors of the day, the committee that came up with v6 decided to ignore the underlying hardware reality. There's no corresponding type in C (or the underlying hardware, without going into SSE) that can store a v6 address natively Huh? That's what abstractions like sockaddr_storage are for. Who cares how the address maps to the underlying CPU word size? It's the same reason you shouldn't be storing pointers in ints. Portability requires effort. That's just life.