Here’s the thing - all the hardware supports it now. Has done for the last couple of decades. Your home router almost definitely does, your carrier’s switches and routers almost definitely do, there’s ipv6 support all the way to Google and Amazon and Netflix and whoever else you want to connect to. It’s a pile of people refusing to implement software (mostly proprietary software - again, open-source systems have supported IPv6 for a very long time) and administrative support for it that’s the issue.
If you want an IPv6 address over your existing IPv4 connectivity, you can get one in a number of ways - that’s an overlay network that is already supported by a massive amount of hardware and free software.
Not actually true. There are plenty of hardware L3/4 switching/routing/flow acceleration chips. IP4 is fast on 32bit machines but IP6 is 4 times the word size there. Hardware does matter.
Yeah, it exists in hardware implementations too, but most devices that have IP stacks (of either IP version) do it in software because they're general-purpose computing devices.
And it's the general-purpose computing devices that are lagging in IPv6 support, not the networking-centric hardware implementations. It's been quite a while since business-quality networking devices shipped without IPv6 support.
For those home / small-business routers which still lack support, that is probably going to be a software implementation either way, and at the very least the software nature of any IPv6 implementation added through a "firmware" update (really just an OS update) won't be a performance bottleneck for those devices.
In some of those cases a firmware update has even been released by the manufacturer, just not applied. In many more, IPv6 is supported by the networking device and the software/firmware but simply disabled, or not supported by one or both of the ISP and the end-user device.
Imagine an overlay network that consists of nodes running directly on end users' computers. It has its own routing system and it can establish connections to other nodes via local network, via internet, punching holes through NAT, etc. If popular things like web browsers implement support for that overlay network, ISPs don't even have to provide NAT or routable IP addresses to customers that want to access the web, they can just run some nodes themselves that have internet connectivity and expect end users' nodes to find those nodes over local network and get web connectivity over that overlay network. Of course there are no limits of how integrated overlay networks can become. But notice how little change overlay networks can be made to impose on everyone and to support effortless gradual transition.
The time to bikeshed this stuff is long, long passed, take the time, understand the options, stop writing off ipv6 as impractical, or never going to happen, nobody is writing a (different) overlay network.
Except educating users on how to install their overlay network of choice.
And how many will they need to install? Will everyone install a generic one that all software just works with? Kinda sounds like IPv6, just with the added network in network overheads, and a competitor (IPv6) that's years ahead in terms of real world deployment.
And then there's the suggestion ISPs could run these popular overlay network nodes, that customers don't even need IP. I'll pass on slicing up the internet into walled gardens that's ISPs get to choose which overlay networks you can access!
Web browsers could bundle everything with the next update or use the one already installed, see tor browser bundle for example. No need to educate users. Other software could rely on preinstalled daemons and guide users to "install the internet" on first use if necessary.
And ISPs shouldn't be able to do any harm with those transport nodes, they shouldn't be able to even see what kind of stuff those nodes proxy.
How is this any better than IPv6? Each browser having its own overlay sounds like the good old days of AOL.
Ignoring that massive issue, which daemons get installed? Who installs them? Who updates them? End users won't. So it's up to the Software+OS vendor and ISP - Just like IPv6.
Don't get me wrong, IPv6 has been, so far, a pretty epic failure in terms of adoption. But your plan seems to put it all in the hands of the exact same people, but at the same time, gives them a massive incentive to partition the internet into a whole bunch of tiny walled gardens.
IPv6 is the future of IP connectivity, that is not going to change.