maybe not exactly the goal here but: if get/set would need only the name of the variables and not the template, it would make it somewhat easier to use the same patch for different purposes. e.g. [get x y z] instead of [get somenameherewhichcanbeusedonlyinonespecificpatch x y z]

I guess an other way of making it faster to use pointers in complex situations would be to assign pre-defined symbol-names to pointers (which would be fixed like any other variable), instead of the codes assigned internally - but maybe that's not really feasible to program.

And to add my two cents -

The "pointer/get/set" approach to manipulating data is horribly clunky,
both unintuitive and inefficient. If you can think of a better way I'd
love to hear it.

It seems to me that patch languages are badly suited to this kind of task -
but if one were to design a text-language style interface, what language
would be suitable? Or indeed is there a compleetely different way to think
about it? I've been wondering about this since Pd's start around 1997 :)