Kevin
If you really feel strongly about it, write it. If it isn't accepted into mainline, that's how it goes, but I'm move convinced by code than talk. Show me that the features you propose are useful, and won't cause usability and performance problems, and you'll have my vote.
I fear the usefulness rather depends on the use case and therefor might not necessarily convince anyone if you don't see the need for it just because the code is in place.
In the meantime, I feel like neither side is going to agree with the other outright. It's open source. Scratch your own itch, and maybe others will want the same thing. Until something exists, we're arguing about imaginary code, and the implications of such.
Well, usually it's a good idea to communicate and sync up with the developer community first and not just throw code at them. At least that's how it usually is known to work at the ASF. And Thrift is still in incubation. That means community should be priority number one. If were giving a rat's ass about this I wouldn't be on the list but rather just had made the changes myself without this thread.
cheers -- Torsten
