Sure, that's true, I'm a heavy user of the standard protobuf library in python, and you certainly won't catch me singing its praises for its style. But that's

Sure, that's true, I'm a heavy user of the standard protobuf library in python, and you certainly won't catch me singing its praises for its style. But that's a different (and less important) kind of problem. It does not exhibit the huge issue with generated-and-then-modified code where you have to maintain all the generated code rather than just the source from which it was generated.