My response then is mostly as it is now - it's just too confusing to read and write. The UIs - even at the time - telling people to put in a dotted quad - were... manageable. 4 is an easy number to understand. Numbers only is easy to understand.

I still maintain that had some intermedia come out adding 2 (or possibly 4) more spaces and we transitioned from

187.43.250.198 to 0.0.187.43.250.198, and defaulted most UIs to just prefixing with the 0.0 then grew from there, we'd have had much faster adoption, and still given ourselves 64k 4 billion address spaces.

But... I'm not a network technician, nor am I on the committees... I'm just someone who's had to live with the last 20 years of "ipv6 is coming, we're running out of ipv4 addresses!!" and... the last 5-10 years of trying to mess around with ipv6 and realizing it's still mostly out of my control (home ISPs, ime, do not, support it still).

tldr, I never expected ipv6 to be adopted quickly. I'm surprised it's made it this far.