If you appreciate quaternions for what they can do for you, but also find them frustratingly unintuitive/ugly, then you may be interested in bivectors (https://bivector.net/) and geometric algebra more broadly. They're equivalent in power, but suddenly everything actually makes sense!
Well, dang. I remember you from the very late 1980s at Stanford. Never met you but saw you on the timesharing systems of the time. A few years later I enjoyed a talk you gave at IBM Yorktown Heights about how you sneaked into Apple to build the graphing calculator.
Well howdy, old-timer! That brings back some memories. (The '80s: after the dinosaurs, but before the giant armored sloths - back when neutrinos were massless and Λ was zero.)
Did you work on Axiom? That was the finest crafted computer algebra system.