When CDP doesn't discover

Marko's myths of VLAN 1 post continues to drive a lot of traffic to my response about CDP, tagging and the magic properties of VLAN 1.

Today I was introduced to a related phenomenon that I found interesting.

Backstory
CDP messages sent by switches are always in VLAN 1. If something other than VLAN 1 is the native VLAN on a particular trunk, then the CDP frame will be tagged with "1".

Funny Business
According to the post linked above there are related conditions that break CDP altogether.

The required elements are:

1. A switch sending tagged CDP frames, either because it's using something other than VLAN 1 as the native VLAN or it's been configured with vlan dot1q tag native
2. A router-on-a-stick that does NOT have a subinterface configured with encapsulation dot1q 1

Apparently the router, having no subinterface configured to receive frames tagged with "1", will toss incoming CDP frames without bothering to look inside to find the CDP message, killing CDP operation altogether. Bummer. And kind of unexpected.

I haven't tested this behavior, nor do I even have an IOS-XR (where the problem was found) box available. I suspect that IOS and IOS-XE systems might have a similar problem because I recently discovered that IOS-XE subinterfaces using VLAN 1 automatically appended the native keyword even if I didn't type it. Yes, I configured a shiny new ASR as on VLAN 1. It wasn't my fault, I was integrating with an established L2 topology and required VLAN tagging.

Why did this even come up?

Frankly, I can't fathom why folks obsessively set their native VLANs to something other than the default. I've changed the native VLAN on trunks where I actually needed to pass a particular VLAN without a tag, but never as a matter of default configuration like is so common in our industry.

Why is everyone typing switchport trunk native vlan X everywhere? Is there a good reason? If you're not using VLAN 1, and it's not allowed on the trunk, then why worry about which VLAN would be untagged on the link if it were allowed?

If there's a good reason for obsessively setting the native VLAN, please let me know in the comments. Comments including the phrase "orfg cenpgvpr" (ROT13) will be deleted.