Right, I've seen the padded v4-like v6 address spec, but that's not how they attempted to transition everything. ISPs gave everyone new v6 addresses, and the whole home/office router/NAT/PC ecosystem put v6 on a totally separate plane with ::: style addresses presented to users. I understand that the clean slate of reallocated addresses would solve some problems, but they could have focused on just getting all that hardware and software onto the ipv6 protocol with minimal changes before attempting to basically redo the entire Internet along with every LAN.

As an end user who has a choice, they have to give me something that's not harder to use than before. I think they could have managed that if it were a priority.