I've come to believe ergonomics is a siren song here, mostly because recently I've been considering panics as forbidden as memory unsafety is... it's never okay

I've come to believe ergonomics is a siren song here, mostly because recently I've been considering panics as forbidden as memory unsafety is... it's never okay for your embedded system or web server to panic, so don't act like that style is somehow preferable. If you "know" the index is in bounds, you can get_unchecked. Otherwise you should get. Either would be a sane choice for the index operator.