Seems to me you did what any engineer worth his salt would do: sit down and look at the underlying mechanisms, to map the problem, and then highly efficient solutions present themselves. It's amazing to me no one seems to have done this before.

That raises the question why did Rust pivot to lifetimes? It was a bias towards theory? Or they just missed the simplication of their model? So they exited the problem space too early, happy to have found a solution?

I sure am happy to see this non-dogmatic thinking, many blessings are to come of it. It seems we are getting closer to the "final language", and languages become a solved problem.