I have been working on coding standards, trying to figure out how to reconcile the need to not limit creative programmers, while not over-burdening maintainers with overly creative code.

I have had trouble figuring out where to draw the line on cleverness, and I think your example is very helpful in this respect.

It's really great code. It is useful, powerful, and I like it. I think that it would be really helpful to translate it into more mundane code to compare the ease of understanding and maintainance. Perhaps someone could even compare the difference in the difficulty of adding table headers, which you mentioned as a possible enhancement.

I have noticed that both the quest and the map operations are associated with much unfathomable code, and I now I suspect that that the combination is multiplicative.

I hope you don't mind if your code shows up in our coding standard!