Honestly, I've done quite a bit of DNS handling, mangling, and manhandling, and never once really thought about it or have been bothered by it, nor have had any reason to look into how the underlying protocol works. Which, I guess, means it's a good protocol because of not leaking abstractions.

I actually think the DNS binary protocol is a rather well-designed one, but others might disagree.

DNS result "compression" is crap though...

I like binary protocols, I think they are interesting.