Maybe bloat wasn't the right term (was thinking that it bloats the code, not the resulting program), but when you're in a scenario where you're doing one thing

Maybe bloat wasn't the right term (was thinking that it bloats the code, not the resulting program), but when you're in a scenario where you're doing one thing more often than the default, it feels like boilerplate to have to continually say `String::from("some string ref")` (as an example) just to take ownership when that's what you want every single time. Or, at least something like an "owning assignment" or "owning deref" operator that automatically adds the `to_owned()` call would help reduce boilerplate. Maybe it was a mistake to conflate lifetimes and generics. It wouldn't be so bad to deal with references in Rust if you didn't have to include lifetime parameters when building APIs. It seems silly that (in my experience) people gravitate toward structs with owned fields just to avoid specifying the lifetime of a borrowed field.