I don’t understand why you seem to ignore the reality of prevalent misuse of the ! operator. The argument about it’s use for chaining falls squarely into the “power tool use”, which no one’s questioning. The reality of everyday Swift is that this single operator is responsible for complete negation of type safety benefit brought on by the Optional type in practice. It is the smoking foot-gun of Swift, see the evidence from StackOverflow. When this issue was raised in the Resolved: Insert "!" is a bad fixit thread, @rudkx asked what should be done instead, to not let users hanging with code that doesn’t compile. This proposal offers a concrete solution that is in line with rest of DSL for Optional handling in Swift which is operator based.