> C# Nullable<T> is near useless because it only works on value types. I.e., you know, the types that are least likely to generate NullReferenceException for you.

You are completely missing the point of Nullable. It was introduced because databases allowed int, float, etc ( value types ) to be null. It was never meant to be an Option type. Reference types are already "nullable" so the database returning null for strings wasn't a problem. But databases returning nulls for int was a problem. It led to performance issues ( boxing and/or adding additional code to marshal data from one source to another ). If you find Nullable to be annoying then you either don't code in C# much and you especially don't deal with data/databases.

For what it was intended for, Nullable did it's job. And if Nullable is your only complaint, given the extraordinary changes that C# has gone through, I think it speaks well for C#.