[miguelmurca]

It's true, I do enjoy being perverse. However, I think it's a bit unfair to say I have "picked up a few pieces of knowledge, become excited, and tried to hack their way through by themselves, without understanding the broader ecosystem of other packages and conventions". I'm aware of xparse, and other tools in the ecosystem (etoolbox, ifthenelse). This doesn't mean that I shouldn't try to get a given result with the provided primitives, rather than use an existing codebase. Very analogous to writing your own X programming lib rather than using an existing one: good for experimenting and learning, but maybe not something you should go for in production. (Of course, I'm certainly not at the level of a LaTeX team member.)

[svat]

Yes fair! Sorry about that; I was focused on the comment I was replying to and forgot about being fair to you; I've now edited my post to change "without understanding" to "without bothering to integrate with" (and some other changes); hope it reads better now!

And as I said, doing things one's own way with the primitives is perfectly fine… I too have participated in my share of TeX perversity and doing things it wasn't designed for (example: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/403353); I guess it's one of the things that attracts people like us to such an old system. :-)

[miguelmurca]

Re. 403353: That's a lovely stackexchange post, and inspiring; I've run into it more than once when googling for answers. Great running into you here, and thanks for caring enough to rephrase the post.