Tl:dr: I’m not married to the idea of dictionaries, I just want to be able to deal with complex data structures dynamically, simply, and to/from the api. Hence the OP: if there is a way that [text] can do that (I know it is API supported although no example nor documentation) then I can try to get it to work. I’ll try Alexandre’s [messdict].
== 2c: I used to hate dicts, in Max, then in SC. Then I started to nest them. and that became incredibly powerful.
A few UX vignettes, if anyone is curious:
Example: you start a patch with states, you can make presets. Suddenly you can make preset of subpatches in their own dicts and recall them from a top dict. and the data is human readable. for growing projects, it is powerful.
another example: in flucoma, the neural nets are trained. you dump them as dict. Then in a workshop, people started to make presets of trainings, by nesting these complex dicts in dicts. I was flabbergasted. At the moment, there is no way to do that inside Pd… except saving the states on files (because flucoma supports that) and then reloading. a bit messy.
the last example: I wanted to do a leaky integrator of a multidimensional statful object. In Max and SC, I dump the state as a dict, mess programmatically with the dict, then load the new state in the object. A Pd user wanted to do that, and contacted me. they managed via [text] and temporary files, the hack works, but they are sad they cannot dump/load states like other users.