An NTP pool storm

Sounds like the whole thing was handled well by all concerned. I would like to comment on your last line about "capacity to do something foolish" though. This would seem to encourage an attempt to write software that can't do anything foolish. Unfortunately, I think "foolish" is very context dependent and what is clearly a bad idea in one context may very well be the best solution in another one. Please consider this a plea to developers to continue to write software that is flexible.