I spent 7 months of my life dedicated to solving this problem and let me say, it is not easy because I failed. But I learned something really important, we are

I spent 7 months of my life dedicated to solving this problem and let me say, it is not easy because I failed. But I learned something really important, we are all doing it wrong. An index/offset based approach isn't the best solution, even with OT. Instead, we should have been looking at this problem as a linked list, where every character has a unique ID that can be pointed to. Doing operations this way is safe and becomes idempotent. I'm busy building a database to back this type of data, but will be implementing a solution using this approach soon. Great work to everybody else hitting this problem, keep it up!