That was a lovely vignette, thanks. Much earlier in my career I had exactly the sense suggested that “something’s off” about the Schwartzian, even though it became a useful and idiomatic tool at the time. I only really understood the disquiet much later, when working with columnar data, and realising the positive qualities of declaring structs-of-arrays rather than arrays-of-structs, with subsequently excellent mechanical sympathy, and so on from there.