[kbenson]

> f the environment lacks these basic capabilities though..

And that's the point, right? You're evaluating the toolkit, and if it lacks the features to make these tasks fairly easy, then it's going to be harder to do a lot of straightforward things.

I imagine a similar set of tasks could (and have) easily be contrived for other common libraries/toolkits that are used, such as HTTP client libraries, numerical libraries, etc.