If one of my engineers brought me this "protocol" (um, protocols require state machines, where is it?), we would be having a series of long talks to figure out whether he needs to be educated or fired.

What happens if I want to run NTP on an ARM M4 microcontroller with a lithium coin cell battery? Because, you know, perhaps I actually might want my time to be accurate on devices that even outship cell phones?

Sending that message would be difficult without drift because of the huge number of bytes involved. Transmission time is far too long. I could go on and on...

If you want to see a relatively well designed protocol, go chew through the BLE (Bluetooth Low Enregy) spec. It's not perfect, but it shows you how to balance functionality vs. engineering (note the number of times you have a "length" parameter so that you can chew through your binary blobs even if you can't parse all of it).

Please quit giving ESR a platform when it's quite clear he really sucks as a programmer.