The trailing-dot-to-anchor thing is hidden away from the user by probably a majority of tools now for managing DNS records. If anything, this has probably made

The trailing-dot-to-anchor thing is hidden away from the user by probably a majority of tools now for managing DNS records. If anything, this has probably made the situation a bit worse by allowing a lot of people to spend years managing DNS records without even knowing about it. Then they edit a BIND text file or something that doesn't assume it and it all goes wrong. As far as client-side tools... no one ever uses the trailing dot and that can lead to some interesting situations if you have a search path set and use a resolver that resolves wildcard. Use of the search path at all is fairly unusual for "client-ish" setups though. You could also view the common non-use of the trailing dot as one of the causes of the ICANN recommendation against top-level domains resolving, as the search-vs-hostname-vs-fqdn ambiguity would be less common (but still present) if people commonly used the trailing dot.