Networking engineers have a history of limiting their involvement in broadly based IT purchasing decisions. The difference between progress and stagnation, productivity and wasted time is the ability to make an efficient, timely decision. Our industry goes off on these costly tangents because the professionals who are most capable of designing the future have punted on that opportunity. With DHCP, Microsoft overcame IP's so-called complexity in a heartbeat once it realized that until it embraced IP, Microsoft would never unseat Novell. It took 10 years for the resulting chaos of protocols and products to sort out, primarily waiting for the user community to mature.
Network engineers get satisfaction from concentrating on lower-level protocols and components.
It's not like we don't have plenty of work to do designing and deploying the backbone networks on which our organizations depend. See, back then no one had time to deal with file sharing, and today no one's got time for e-commerce. Furthermore, the Internet is becoming more complicated. Ten years ago you could spend a week at Interop and get a handle on it. Today, it would take you years.