You're right that the main challeges are political & bureaucratic inertia. That shouldn't stop us from honestly & plainly describing its core, & the industry's

You're right that the main challeges are political & bureaucratic inertia. That shouldn't stop us from honestly & plainly describing its core, & the industry's state-of-the-art for similar systems that don't have the legacy system's encumbrances. The "globally agreed-upon data format" is essentially text blobs with a standard set of abbreviations, that assist search/filtering by flight-paths & planned waypoints. It seems to be a mere 150MB a year. The inherently "move slowly" modernization effort can only be helped by a clearer outline of what's now possible. This is too important to prematurely dumb-down brainstorming ideas, based on low-expectations for the adoption process! And a modern architecture for distributed updates & reliability could trivially mimic the old system's pilot-visible outputs, to remain familiar to tenured personnel.