DCB: How to Engineer your way out of a poor architecture decision!

I recently gave a presentation to the New Zealand Network Operators Group (NZNOG) 2011 conference on “Data Centre 3.0”. During my research over the last 8 months coupled with the fact checking I had been following up during the creation of the slides, I kept asking myself:

"Would we need all these protocols if we, as an industry, had made better technology implementation decisions?"

I understand the background and requirements for some of the different technology proposals, particularly Layer 2 Multi-path and the various Data Centre Bridging (DCB) QoS standards, but I cant help but feel that we are trying to bring features of the higher layer protocols down into Layer 2.