I don't think paying ADs works. And if you remember, I had a position as a paid AD at W3C.
Why don't people think they are equivalent? Well, its because the people you can afford pay to do that job are going to be folk starting out in their careers. And it is the person, not just the position that gives the position authority.
Once you have paid staff, the relationship becomes very different. I thought we were going to create something like the MIT media lab. Having made billions for Microsoft et. al., they could give us a few million to do whacky stuff with little expectation of success. Ask for $50K from Microsoft and it will come from a middle manager with a budget and the need to show they are spending it wisely. Ask for $2 million and they know they are never going to see it back..
Of course in the proto-IETF, the AD positions were paid, they were the ARPA program managers. I can't see going back to that model.
Once you have staff you need reporting structures and accountability. The AD selection process is intentionally designed to avoid accountability.
If the IETF was going to have paid staff, it would be a different organization and the staff would be in support roles rather than quasi-managerial and they would be looking at the needs of Internet users generally. If the IETF was going to do that then it would really need another name like the Internet Society, say.
The IETF could do things that would allow the IESG to avoid doing quite as much makework but I don't know if a reduction in work is possible because even if all the vanity crypto and RFCs that are only needed to issue code points in registries are stripped away, work will expand to fill the available time.
