IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday by reaching 10 percent deployment (Ars Technica)

On whether options could have been considered because of blocking, note that the comparison would have been versus a completely new protocol that *0* routers supported at all. Would IP options have been dropped at some routers? Sure - though, IP options were a lot more acceptable in the 90s when IPv6 was in the late design phase. Does that mean that choosing to deploy a whole new protocol, that didn't work *on any* router, that needed every router to be upgraded, and a whole new logical layer to be configured, and lots of ancillary protocols to be re-specified (ICMP, IGMP^WMLD, etc., etc.) was the easier option? I don't think the answer to that question is an obvious "of course"....