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that’s like saying addresses are enough to deliver mail. there’s still flow control , error correction , buffering , authentication , stream multiplexing, compression, encoding etc etc

streaming protocols handle this at the app layer but it would have been nice to have a protocol between reliable tcp and wild west udp

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I don't think most of these things should live at the Transport Layer personally. I am certainly a fan of SCTP but SCTP hasn't yet received widespread middlebox adoption. Unfortunately, the state of IP Media is pretty terrible. SIP/RTP/RTMP are all very complicated and fiddly to get working. The WebRTC stack, which wraps some of these protocols up, is its own beast. XMPP media stacks tend to be IMO the "simplest" and even they are quite complicated.

As someone who's rolled a few custom UDP network stacks I would tend to agree.

UDP is pretty low level(yay MTU discovery) but it gives you most of the tools you need which is why a good number of SCTP implementations are just built on top of it.

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