NAT is a denial of service attack, not a means of policy
enforcement.
I wonder if NAT is to ietf discussions as Nazis was
to Usenet discussions.
That is, will every heated IETF debate eventually lead to
invoking the NAT bogyman?
The national socialist party is (hopefully) a thing of the distant past.
NATs, OTOH, are very much still with us.
I think we often end up talking about NATs because NATs are a symptom
that our architecture has fundamental unsolved problems that we so far
have failed to address (or that the market has failed to adopt, but
it's closer to the former, I think.)
The SPAM problem is another one of those recurring discussions that
never seems to be resolved, for similar reasons.
If we had a workable solution in hand for either problem, there would be
little point in our talking about them. As it is, we keep revisiting
them in the hope that some new idea will emerge, or that some bit of
denial about those problems will go away.
Keith