[wyager]

>Conversions between our 5(!) string types are very common.

All five of those string types do different things. This isn't a problem; we just have increased expressivity. We couldn't fix this by having a more coordinated standard library. 5 is also a very manageable number IMO.

>It's too difficult to make larger changes as we cannot atomically update all the packages at once.

That's what Stack is for, no?