Eight years ago, I was in the "more effort needed" school of thought about IPv6. I figured we'd slowly update our programs and toolkits and libraries and reference material and college textbooks and switches, etc., and by 2005 it'd be about the right time to switch over. It will be painful, I thought, but necessary and ultimately a very good thing. So I waited and watched, much as I'm sure many of the HN readers have been doing. I figured that those people who are smarter and more connected than me would form the leadership of the IPv6 migration and show the rest of us the way to 128-bit Internet addressing bliss.
Realistically, though, we're no closer to a workable migration to IPv6 today then we were in 2002. Since then, we've managed to switch from analog to digital TV (at least in the US), migrate most software from ISO-8859-1 to some flavor of Unicode, settle the Blueray/HD-DVD format war, increment the USB protocol twice, formalize HTML into HTML 4.0 and XHTML and HTML 5, and virtualize or emulate every major operating system onto every major hardware platform. But nothing of any substance has happened on the IPv6 front.
The reasons for the lack of progress have been clearly laid out by others, but the unspoken sad reality is that we're wasting our time with IPv6. Even to say "IPv6 migration" implies that it will happen and thus IPv6 is the only solution to IPv4's woes. We're torturing ourselves with IPv6 by going on like this and it's not bringing us any closer to a solution! At this point, there's no reason not to start looking for workable extensions to IPv4 (and TCP/IP in general) to address the issues we're having.
I'd bet that a small group of dedicated engineers could come up with an compatible extension to IPv4 (that expands the address space) and could develop a workable migration strategy, example code, socket library modifications, and a compatible version of Ubuntu all within a year. Imagine the excitement if IPv6 could be sent to the circular file and a clear alternative was not only proposed, but downloadable.
So, in short, that's my solution: cast off IPv6 as the death march project that it is and get excited about a minimum viable product (see what I did there?) alternative to IPv4.
Oh, and since this is HN: I'm sure that there's just no way to make money from an extension to IPv4. No consumer going to need a converter box, to sit between their modem and LAN, right? I mean, the government would have to offer rebates. Madness! No businesses are going to need consulting services or contracted coding work. Nope. It certainly won't be like Y2K, but even it it was I'm sure no one made any money from that transition...