I've been reading some of them through and some of them are actually fairly well rounded. Let's see how they respond to the questions I've posed to them.
I'm specifically interested in the RAII question to see how they justify fundamentally different behavior for syntactically similar code.
You seem to dislike the idea of the default constructor, not RAII. Default constructors, at least for relatively simple types, are meant to be minimalist so as not to incur any significant overhead. Which makes them comparable in this regard to the "default constructor" of 'int'.
