1. Understood! Yes, I agree about messing up the DOM, and I'm sure you've seen some egregious cases haha. asChild definitely enables some less deliberate choices when composing bits and pieces together and assumes some good habits around event handlers - probably not an approach that scales well for growing teams, but definitely convenient for hacking on things. Can I bum you for a link or some search terms for the "other approaches"? I'm curious about them.

2. You're spoiling us. Thank you. Re-visiting the hooks docs, I think I was just meant to use the `Aria...Props` interfaces the whole time haha. I have a feeling I overcomplicated some things in that codebase.

3. "you can only submit strings and not more complex objects" - I think this is the crux of the tradeoff. Frankly, the only thing I use Formik for when I bring it in is binding Zod schemas to form state to get validation messages in a pinch. If React Aria had a first-class schema-driven Form component or similar, I'd be a satisfied "customer".

Had another random question overnight -

4. Have y'all considered implementing anything in the realm of the "CSS Spatial Navigation" proposal? The conversation around it looks like it has gone quiet in the past few years, but I think there's definitely an opportunity for non-grid-y 2D navigation in web UIs.