IPv6 is a crux example of the tradeoff between security and convenience. I understand a lot of the pros of it, and I like them, but... The protocol is certain

IPv6 is a crux example of the tradeoff between security and convenience. I understand a lot of the pros of it, and I like them, but... The protocol is certainly much less human-brain-friendly, which gives points for security, but kills in the area of convenience - even for experienced engineers. As someone who frequently manages networks professionally and personally, I constantly need to look up information on the how the address hashing works, CIDR block ranges, short-hand notation, etc, etc...etc (because there is a lot). It's really added a hinderance to my workflow and makes typical network configuration take much longer than it would have before. It was easy for me to differentiate between LANs and WANs, subnets, etc in IPv4-land because the address space is much more intuitive to work with. CIDR block notation for IPv4 takes a minute to get used to (for new people), but it's easy to learn quickly and understand the ranges of your networks, or at least get a feel for it. Even after working with IPv6 for over a year, I still do not have an intuitive feel for how many addresses or what address range a CIDR block contains - which is extremely useful for debugging issues. If I can look at an IPv4 address in a log, I can immediately track down what subnet/machine had the issue and dig into the issue. IPv6 requires extra steps, and a lot of them. Naturally, NAT became a thing for IPv4. I don't know if it was originally introduced as a firewall mechanism or to cut down on publicly used IPs, but it works well for both. IPv6 circumvents the need for NAT, but then we have NPT, which is also unintuitive. Numbers are much more human friendly, as time has shown. It's easy to understand 127.x.x.x and 192.x.x.x are common prefix to local networks and I think that most people who have worked with computers at all have some understanding of what a "local" network is, but even after reading the article, my brain says "any IPv6 address that starts with an f is probably a special one, but I don't know why, just assume it means something and I'll have to do some Googling about 'prefixes' to figure it out". I like some of the pros of IPv6, and maybe after another year of usage it might feel more intuitive, but right now it comes with a serious learning curve and anytime I need to work with it, I get an instant headache. Also, have you ever looked at one screen to mentally grab an IP address and then needed to type it into another? Or asked a coworker for the machine's address so that you can take a look? Get used to using copy-paste a lot, because there's no way that you can glance at a screen for 2 seconds and mentally go, "aaah. Just need to ssh user@aksj:dfja:skja:sviw:eijf:000i:hate:00my:life....easy peasy"