Worth Reading: Was MPLS TE Worth the Effort?
Bruce Davie continues documenting the tradeoffs we had to make in networking, this time with Was MPLS Traffic Engineering Worthwhile? I found this bit particularly familiar:
It wasn’t hard to make a theoretical argument that MPLS-TE could improve network performance and average link utilization, by moving traffic from congested links to uncongested ones. The hard part was proving that it would actually do a better job in practice than the more traditional methods such as using link weights and multipath routing to achieve the same ends.
"we really did have customer demand for the complexity."
Some form of Dunning Kruger for sure. My take is that MPLS-TE required too much label state in your core. Which was a borden getting it in, a burden troubleshooting it and a burden scaling it.
The concept of MPLS-TE was great though. Happy we have SR(v6) now.
I think it was more along the lines of RFC 1925 rule 4 -- SP Architecture teams reading whitepapers and designing conceptual networks on whiteboards.