I didn't call anything idiotic. But let's just say that grappling with the STL may be slightly preferable to this... thing. And there is some special irony referring to STL as an "esoteric abstraction" while offering your own vastly more esoteric abstractions in the same swoop. And the following paragraph speaks for itself, particularly in the context of developing a fucking database:

> Computers are super fast these days, and real world applications spend 99% of their CPU time doing some very specific item, with the rest of the time spent doing just boring stuff. Accordingly, libstuff is not intended to be hyper-efficient: it's intended to be hyper-usable. This means libstuff uses a lot of std::string objects for pretty much everything. Where a more complex object is required, some higher-level string-based object is used.