That making things more complex provides professionals with careers is a frightening reality I had not considered.
Hentrich, you are always a very articulate.
C++ is a beast but I think your code is quite readable, I browsed your code before and thought it is clear and straightforward. It has some niceties too over C, such as string and some data structures. but they keep piling abstractions over abstractions, even it is as they advertise "zero-cost" abstractions. it is not zero-cost for understandability.
I think it is a human nature to make things complex.
of course, I am all for tinkering and trying to find yourself a cozy homemade environment for your experiments.
I find this distro
https://nixos.org is good for packages.
for me, I become very frustrated easily, and can not afford my ever diminishing clarity of mind.
I will just test this windows 10
https://ameliorated.info/ and call it a day.
Today I will time for "A Confederacy of Dunces".
regards