Administrative scoping is much more flexible than TTL scoping, but suffers from a number of disadvantages. In particular, it is not possible to tell from the address of a packet where it will go unless all the scope zones that the sender is within are known. Also, as administrative boundaries are bi-directional, one scope zone nested within or overlapping another must have totally separate address ranges. This makes their allocation difficult from an administrative point of view, as the ranges ought to be allocated on a top-down basis (largest zone first) in a network where there is no appropriate top-level allocation authority. Finally, it is easy to misconfigure a boundary by omitting or incorrectly configuring one of the routers - with TTL scoping it is likely that in many cases a more distant threshold will perform a similar task lessening the consequences, but with administrative scoping there is less likelihood that this is the case.
For these reasons administrative scoping has been viewed by many network administrators as a specialty solution to difficult configuration problems, rather than as a replacement for TTL scoping, and the MBone still very much relies on TTL scoping.