As much as I would have loved to get out in sooner than six years, I tend to agree. In hindsight, if I'd treated it like a job and just done the coding and writing necessary to get the projects I published out the door, I could have done it in three, maybe two. But that would have missed the whole point.
IPv6 is arguably a good example of what happens when you don't do the simplest thing possible. What we really needed was a bigger IP address space. What we got was a whole bunch of other crap. If we had literally expanded IPv4 by a couple of octets at the end (with compatible routing), would we be there now?
We could really take a page from this style for teaching advanced computing. We try to imagine that architectures just kind of come out of nowhere. Starting with mechanical computing and unit record equipment makes so much make more sense.