from day zero, i and a few others kept saying that the proxies
were gonna be deadly to the aaa work. but we could not get folk
to let go of them. as an ietf management issue, what can an area
director do in such circumstances? the only real controls i had
were my silver tongue, which failed, and/or shutting the wg, which
would have seemed draconian.
The bottom line was that the WG did not care about security, and therefore
treated the required security measures (e.g. Diameter CMS) necessary to make
proxies safe largely as measures designed to satisfy the IESG, rather than a
real cost. Once forced to either take the security requirements imposed by
proxies seriously or abandon proxies, the WG chose to abandon proxies.
However, that was 3+ years and many hundreds of man years later -- and the
protocol had gained huge amounts of (largely unnecessary) complexity in the
process.