The question was pretty much answered if you knew anything about the IT industry. When Cisco drops a protocol from their routing products, it's dead. Novell dropped NetWare which was the death of IPX. When the dominant stock holder or player of a protocol or technology is out; the protocol or technology will die out due to obsolence.
I supported a WAN in a large school district with Appletalk, IPX and IPv4. It was a nightmare. I also did some DECnet before it was phased out (pun intended).
If you're that concerned about it, tunnel what you're doing over IPv4/6. Problem solved. Next thing you're going to ask is for token ring with VLANs.