There is work afoot, or at least on people's to-do lists, to mechanize creation of the outfuncs/readfuncs/etc code directly from the Node struct declarations. So special cases for particular fields are going to be looked on with great disfavor,
I agree with this, but I don't think there is no value in my suggestion
unless I missed something. Per my current understanding, the code
is too easy to make the datadir incompatible with binary, which requires
user to do some extra work and my suggestion is to avoid that and
it is the value. I think it is possible to make this strategy work with the
"mechanize creation of the outfuncs/readfuncs/ect node", but there is
no point to try it unless we make agreement on if we should do that.
even if you can make a case that there's some reason to do it. (Which I'm not seeing. We've certainly never had to do it in the past.)