[maxbond]

Yeah for sure. I think your intuition is almost right. Python does have a "batteries included" philosophy, but it's also not usually clear or documented what data structures something is using. Like I presume that Python's sets are syntactic sugar over dictionaries where the values are None, but when I skimmed the docs just now I didn't find any mention of the implementation details.

Python doesn't want you thinking in terms of data structures, just in terms of functionality. Which I think is unfortunate and limiting.