QUIC as a solution to protocol ossification

It sounds like there's disagreement about "endpoints should have control, not the network(/middleboxes)" vs "the network should have control, not endpoints" - but I think they're both derived from the same starting point of "competent people should have control, not incompetent people".

There are problems caused by incompetence on both sides - e.g. everyone can (and does) fail to implement standards correctly. Competent people working on endpoints can easily fix any problems on their side but will suffer badly from problems in the network. Competent people working on the network can easily fix any problems on their side but will suffer badly from problems in the endpoints. Everyone will tend to overestimate the level of incompetence in the other side, because that's what they spend most of their time fighting against. And since they are themselves competent, it's quite reasonable for them to say "it would be better if I was in control of everything". But that leads to contradictory conclusions from the two sides.

It would be nice if competent people *were* in control, but I have no idea how to achieve that without some authority to decide who is competent and to give them control over everything (which may be possible within a data center but not for the global internet). I suppose the endpoint people will win eventually regardless of merit, because it'll reach an equilibrium state when all traffic is encrypted and indistinguishable so middleboxes can't do anything.

(Incidentally, I don't mean to insult specific people as incompetent - they might have been perfectly competent a decade ago and e.g. designed a system that everyone agreed was brilliant at the time, but that now turns out to be fatally flawed because we judge it by new criteria. That's not their fault, but the effect is the same.)