.net could have made equality entirely optional; and it could have exposed machinery to implement equality (including all aspects of it!) by composition, not ma

.net could have made equality entirely optional; and it could have exposed machinery to implement equality (including all aspects of it!) by composition, not manual fiddling - at least not by default! That would have made .net less memory-hungry, faster, less bugprone, and simpler. There's absolutely no good reason for this horribly complicated and inefficient state of affairs; not all platforms/languages suffer from these limitations. As you point out, even F# manages to do better despite the considerable extra limitation of needing to maintain some sort of compatibility even at runtime with the current crazy state, and despite what is certainly a much more limited development budget.