It seems as though the conventional wisdom has changed, because in my large org every device is assigned a public IP and access is controlled by our border firewall.
It's weird how much NAT has changed the thinking about network organization -- if you have the addresses you should get into the IPv6 state of mind -- publicly address all the things!
Now if your org picked 97/98 arbitrarily without actually owning the addresses relying on the fact that you wouldn't actually get routed any public traffic then that's a different story.
