Over a decade of DDOS--any progress yet?

[sean at donelan.com (Sean Donelan)]

February 2000 weren't the first DDOS attacks, but the attacks on multiple 
well-known sites did raise DDOS' visibility.

What progress has been made during the last decade at stopping DDOS 
attacks?

SMURF attacks creating a DDOS from directed broadcast replies seems to 
have been mostly mitigated by changing defaults in major router OS's.

TCP SYN attacks creating a DDOS from leaving many half-open connections 
seems to have been mostly mitigated with SYN Cookies or similar OS 
changes.

Other than buying lots of bandwidth and scrubber boxes, have any other 
DDOS attack vectors been stopped or rendered useless during the last 
decade?

Spoofing?

Bots?

Protocol quirks?