Ghost's first port of call is IP multicast. If you have that, you're set, and it doesn't need anything else. If you're in a single subnet, IP multicast should work just fine unless your switches have it explicitly blocked, or they are Layer3 switches but you haven't configured an IGMP querier (in which case, you should configure an IGMP querier).

Only if you have a network which is - whether by accident or design - not capable of IP multicast do you need to fall back to something else.

At the moment, that something is still WINS; there are several reasons for that but one of the most important is that WINS has several capabilities that don't really have a proper equivalent in DNS. The most important is that WINS works on a subnet without needing any server configured, by using local broadcast. So, even if your switch is configured to not support IP multicast, if you're in a single-subnet situation WINS will just work unless you have also explicitly blocked broadcast in your switches. The second thing WINS does is that it has "group" addresses.

There is a zeroconf DNS variant, which does have all the important capabilities that we use WINS for, but it does that by using IP multicast so that's not a suitable fallback.

For regular unicast DNS, for it to really replace what we use WINS for, we would have to use DNS SRV records. That's potentially doable, but it's more complex than plain old DNS A records, and it's non-trivial to get those properly installed and configured everywhere they need to be automatically as part of the server installation.

I certainly would like to add more fallback methods, but it's a question of convincing Management that it's a higher priority than other things we can be doing. So, right now in GSS2 the options are IP multicast (preferred) or WINS (fallback).