the intent behind the ipv6 spec was to remove dhcp as a requirement for establishing layer 3 connectivity. there was a generalized notion at the time that other

the intent behind the ipv6 spec was to remove dhcp as a requirement for establishing layer 3 connectivity. there was a generalized notion at the time that other service discovery (dns) would be handled by a more graceful multicast protocol. that was a very reasonable position to take. but operational inertia got in the way. I don't think people really wanted to think about what a dhcp-less world would look like, even if it removed the requirement to manage a central service and the associated configuration. this was kind of ok. but then things got ugly. people wanted to be able to get assigned prefixes dynamically from their upstream provider that they could subnet themselves. because we don't think about these issues architecturally anymore, someone put that function on dhcp. and since we don't think about these issues architecturally anymore no one really realized that that would require _another_ protocol on the inside of that boundary to manage assignments in the providers space. and now we don't even have the option of depreciating dhcp gracefully.