Unfortunately a lot of developers are conditioned so heavily to believe that inheritance is intrinsically bad, that they contort their code into an unreadable m

Unfortunately a lot of developers are conditioned so heavily to believe that inheritance is intrinsically bad, that they contort their code into an unreadable mess just to re-implement something that could have been trivial to do with inheritance. I'm not saying that I like it everywhere; IMHO it's a tool to be used sparingly and not with deep hierarchies. But it's not reasonable to avoid it 100% of the time because we're soiling ourselves over the thought of possibly encountering the diamond problem.