On the other hand, explicitly writing coercions from T to Option<T> gets tiring real fast. I'm sure it should be possible to design a typing+coercion algorithm

On the other hand, explicitly writing coercions from T to Option<T> gets tiring real fast. I'm sure it should be possible to design a typing+coercion algorithm that automatically coerces `x` into `Some(x)` in 99% of the cases that are actually unambiguous (either due to the type of `x` being known not to be an option or due to parametricity), which would be the best of both worlds.