Completely agree. I used to create my own error type(s) manually and implement the various conversions for 3rd party crates and it was quite a lot of boilerplate but with anyhow (for applications where you don't really care about strict error types) and thiserror (when you need to be a little more thorough).

Actually that's effectively TFA's solution, if they had used thiserror/anyhow from the start there might not have been an issue to begin with. Admittedly it took me a while to find these crates since they're not part of std.

Maybe the community should come together to create a curated list of third party crates that should probably be known by all Rust devs? Crates like thiserror, anyhow, rand, serde, clap and other "de-facto standard" crates?