Personally I feel like 3 should not be an option. Either things are okay or not okay, I don't like the "sort of okay maybe" option because that implies lots of

Personally I feel like 3 should not be an option. Either things are okay or not okay, I don't like the "sort of okay maybe" option because that implies lots of fuzzy definitions and boundaries that the developer just has to learn. Schema says int? Give it an int or fail. Not "it's sort of okay if you give it a thing which could be coerced into an int according to the database's ideas of coercability".