Michael,
There is little doubt that the 'existing operational ecology'
is a very suboptimal paradigm (4,5, or whatever-level). It is
suboptimal for IPv4 and extremely suboptimal for IPv6.
Kamoun and Klienrock were specific ) and Tanenbaum in his latest
and greatest third edition agreed ) that a ln(N) hierarchical
superstructure is optimal for large networks. They also
conclude that path-length is 'not a real problem', just to be
complete.
BTW, and please do not take this in a negative way and I
offer my apologies for the following diatribe:
\begin{diatribe}
Documenting 'the way things are' is nice for 'informational
and historical' purposes. But, building new paradigms and
structures on top of highly suboptimal and outdated architectures
just added to the problem and does little to move society
toward progress.
Using the 'information RFC' logic below; we could easily apply
the same logic to humankind. Crime, hatred, envy, greed, selfishness,
etc. is 'the way human society exists' suboptimal and problematic.
Why strive to build a better 'human network' when the 'informational
human RFC' (IHRFC maybe 
clearly documents a very suboptimal
civilization.
Anyway, as I once had to learn and still learn every day, _opinions_
are not unique and everyone has at least five thousand of them,
making _opinions_ noise with knowledge. Doing the background research,
going back to the body of knowledge in the field and adding
foundation to vision and opinion significantly decreases the
noise level.
\end{diatribe}
Just think how effective NANOG or any group could be if all the working
members took the time to learn the body of background knowledge
others have left around as 'clues'.
Best Regards,
Tim