You'd still need to update and replace every system a packet would touch. Why just add another 8 or 16 bits and make it where we'd have to go through this entire painful process again? IPv6's design was "we never want to do this again".

An example of this "we never want to do this again" is only 1/8 of the v6 address space is currently marked usable for allocation. We have 7 more chances to change allocation methods without having to update or change any system.

Not to mention that we can “visualize” the segments and networks by the numbers. Makes it easier to recognize, as an analogy,

This state, that city, this road, that house.

Versus ipv6. Of course there’s so much space in v6 that it isn’t an issue except it’s such a pain to work with for people who tend to think in ipv4 octets and bit masks

There's way more to ipv6 than additional octets. I don't run ipv6 on my wlan (pretty much only for my mobile phone) because I can't be arsed to wrap my head around ipv6 autoconfig and NAT (or rather not NAT) whereas setting up dhcp is a breeze.