Jim,
I don't know if I qualify as one of the folks who
"really operate the Internet", but I'd like to point
out that we have customers who would like to have
a readable, logical domain name and willing to be
outside of ".com". Each of these domains seems to
be well-thought out and I don't think they will be
any shortage of users or candidate registries.
If you need to know that there will be a registry
for each new gTLD, then I'm willing to run any of
them that cannot otherwise find a home.
/John