How many bits for a IPv6 IP vs a IPv4 IP?
Yes of course they should of thought about this before designing the hardware with a maximum ability to comprehend a ipv4 IP...
I remember having this discussion with people close to the principles about the NCP to TCP/IP transition when the 32-bit (four octet) address size was picked.
The sound bite was that it's bigger than the biggest European phone number, so they planned ahead for a time when there would be as many computers as phones, which seemed way enough. (Remember, NCP had a hosts.txt file that listed all the hosts.)
For DNS, they designed an hierarchical system, but events overtook the hierarchy and people got fetishistic about names, leading to most names being in ".com" and being public-facing. The original theory was that the hierarchy would be more important, with more hosts in organizations and so on.
But on the IP side, the segmentation with subnetting (and later, classless subnetting) made things more complicated, so it became possible to run out of IP addresses even though there were still plenty available, but fragmented. Along the way with all the subnetting routing got more complicated and there were a few routing table crises that required new algorithms and lots of new designs, and that pretty much works miraculously now, but doesn't solve the walled-off inaccessible IP address problems.
If you can figure out a way to transparently change who firewalled-off Class A subnet over to a non-routable private net and then release the class A net, you could reset the clock back to the problem IPv4 thought it was solving and become a zillionaire in the process.