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As the author, I must say I really enjoyed your detailed comments and Biblical exegesis on my paper. FYI, your guess on the big OOP failure is correct. Also, the Baskin Robbins footnote is a joke between myself and a physicist friend. The paper is a chapter in a book on computer music published by IRCAM that is worth reading too. Keep up the good work!
This is a very nice classification. It does ring true in my experience, although I would put a few more levels between level 3 and level 4. Very few people are anywhere near level 4.
Your level 3 makes a few "level 2 mistakes". For example, time outs are evil, since they force a decision to be made at the wrong level of the system. Protocol stacks shouldn't use time outs. Rather, they should pass the request to stop or continue waiting to the right level of the system (which can go all the way up to the application level and even to the user level!). Unfortunately, the most-used protocol stacks either don't implement this or it's not exposed to the application programmer. And so we still have a long way to go.