I've affected all of the change that I am capable of, and I need to decide if I'm happy with D as is, or not, rather than maintain myambient frustration that it's sitting at 99%, with the last 1% unattainable to me unless I fork the language for my own use :/
Try to add some rudimentary support for ref in the compiler yourself?
It is not a big semantic change (it is only pointers after all).