That's the issue though---there was already an arms race (between users and ISPs), and it was making it hard to create reliable consumer electronics devices bec

That's the issue though---there was already an arms race (between users and ISPs), and it was making it hard to create reliable consumer electronics devices because DNS logic is complicated and the complexity adds cost (and more importantly, pushes configuration burden from the device onto the user). It sucks that customization was damaged in the arms race, but that's the nature of measure-countermeasure in web technologies across the board. Every web technology is a three-edged sword: the spec, the intention behind the spec, and the real-world implementation of the spec. DNS / DHCP implementation drifted from intention years ago.