Rant? I don't think so.

First day of holiday - manager messages that about small issues, ignored that.
Second day of holiday - received a message that everything is going wrong. Apparently I can't take any holidays as the world will burn in the meantime...

Come on, how hard can it be?

On every fucking TLV data structure I get to handle, the hobo who defined the structure obviously stopped reading the TLV specification after the second sentence.
Fucked up tags, misuse of length encoding, and as a result no real TLV parser can handle that crap. Workarounds and manual parsing all over the place for *every* *single* interface.

Get your shit together, and if you don't want to handle the complex parts, then at least make the simple types right.