Hey, Rowan, don't apologize for making the case for what you believed to be the right way. I'm glad I could summarize my views in a way that you could agree with me.
I've reread your point about the transpilers and obfuscators, and you're right, I misunderstood what you said. I'm sorry. Now, I'd be willing to create a new RFC draft for a native annotation syntax, targeted at 7.1, this time explaining the reasons NOT to do this in docblocks nor in a seperate extension, so the discussion won't get sidetracked again. I'd need some help with the patches, though, since I don't have any experience with the internals. There is still the issue of complexity added to the engine, which we could discuss. I'd like to hear more from a long-term contributor about that, if it's possible. Were there any performance implications on the previously submitted patch? Thank you everyone for the great discussion.
