DNS strikes me as the kind of solution someone designed thinking “eh, this is good enough for now. We can work out some of the clunkiness when more organizations start using the Internet.” But it just ended up being pretty much the best approach indefinitely.
I actually think the design of DNS is really cool. I'm sure we could do better designing from a clean slate today, especially around security (designing with the assumption of an adversarial environment).
But DNS was designed in the 80s! It's actually a minor miracle it works as well as it does
