I think it's worth remembering that the original intent of the internet was entirely p2p and this bootstrapping issue wasn't a problem. In fact, there was a who

I think it's worth remembering that the original intent of the internet was entirely p2p and this bootstrapping issue wasn't a problem. In fact, there was a whole set of protocols developed around global multicast that allowed for discovery to build exactly these structures. So you can't blame the ietf for not thinking of this problem - you can blame them for not being able to respond well when the market went and mucked up their architecture by putting nat everywhere.