Helper software for twm/fvwm/etc

Possibly, but I doubt it. That was back around NM 0.8. I moved my work laptop to NM in the past few months for 0.9, but the same "drop as soon as the cable is disconnected" behavior happens with wired which did not happen when I was using just wpa_supplicant.

I agree that it has gotten better, but this behavior is a showstopper for me. I brought it up on f-d-l and I did not get the impression that marking networks as "flaky" (so that NM would take N seconds before dropping DNS, IP, and related information on the interface instead of 0) was not an important feature.