IP addresses are not important!

I keep running into an issue with my fellow IT chums, where we seem to have an inbuilt need to add symbolism to IP addressing. Let me give an example - say you have a range from 172.16.0.1-254. The natural inclination is to put "important" stuff like a router at .1, or .254 or whatever. I know, I've felt it plenty of times. But I realised a while ago that such thinking is just wrong. IP addresses should never contain any symbolism whatsoever; it should mean nothing if your network's gateway is .1, .254 or .69. Getting hung up on which IP addresses are assigned to machines, services etc. is just lame. DNS was invented to layer human-readable symbols onto IP addresses, so use it!