[ant5]

I agree with all your points but this one:

The memory management model for the iOS platform is not GC, and it's not manual management. Frankly I found manual management of memory simpler than retain/release. And the autorelease pool? That's just wrong.

retain/release + autorelease pools solve the ownership problem inherent in manual memory management system. You can return a heap allocated object from your function/method and neither you nor the caller have to be concerned about how it will be cleaned up.

Not sure what's wrong with that solution -- I've even implemented/used an equivalent implementation for pure C code.