Absolutely, it's a trade-off, and is probably strictly worse for power users.
As a counterpoint to Bitcoin (which is still quite a young and under-adopted protocol), consider how hard it has proven to upgrade the IP protocol from version 4 to 6 (20 years and still not complete?)
Ip works at a much deeper level which is why it's harder to change. Everything uses ip, including hardware and software that's no longer getting updated but is still in use.
Which supports my point -- the quote "federation does freeze protocols in time" was being questioned, and IPv4 is the textbook example of a federated protocol that was frozen in time.
As a counterpoint to Bitcoin (which is still quite a young and under-adopted protocol), consider how hard it has proven to upgrade the IP protocol from version 4 to 6 (20 years and still not complete?)