Wacky? Umm, no. Spewing a packet onto a shared medium and then detecting the presence of noise on the line to indicate a collision, then retransmitting at a random interval until the packet gets through is wacky. Deploying 100baseT everywhere and then putting everything on a MAC-layer-bridged port (thus defeating one of the primary design principles of the networking technology in use) to get anywhere near a usable level of performance is wacky.