Today's e-science, with its extreme-scale scientific applications, marks a turning point for high-end requirements on the compute infrastructure and, in particular, on optical networking resources. Although ongoing research efforts are aimed at exploiting the vast bandwidth of fiber-optic networks to both interconnect resources and enable high-performance applications, challenges continue to arise in the area of the optical control plane. This article attempts to explain the rationale for why high-end e-science applications consider optical network resources to be as essential and dynamic as CPU and storage resources in a Grid infrastructure and why rethinking the role of the optical control plane is essential for next-generation optical networks.