It's true, I do enjoy being perverse. However, I think it's a bit unfair to say I have "picked up a few pieces of knowledge, become excited, and tried to hack their way through by themselves, without understanding the broader ecosystem of other packages and conventions". I'm aware of xparse, and other tools in the ecosystem (etoolbox, ifthenelse). This doesn't mean that I shouldn't try to get a given result with the provided primitives, rather than use an existing codebase. Very analogous to writing your own X programming lib rather than using an existing one: good for experimenting and learning, but maybe not something you should go for in production. (Of course, I'm certainly not at the level of a LaTeX team member.)