I mean, there is copious engineering effort internal to, e.g. the Linux kernel. And much goes into RFCs. But is there much internet-wide engineering going on

I mean, there is copious engineering effort internal to, e.g. the Linux kernel. And much goes into RFCs. But is there much internet-wide engineering going on to squeeze out the entropy? Repackaged: the engineering that occurs is more bottom-up than top-down. Google, for example, has enough heft to say: "QUIC: here is a bit of top-down engineering." But that example bolsters my general point, in my opinion.