In recent years, there is evidence of a renewed interest in the use of METAPOST for various drawing tasks. Simultaneously, it seems that just about every METAPOST user runs into some kind of limitation that makes the use of METAPOST far from ideal for the proposed task.

The diagnosis we have to make is whether these symptoms indicate a fatal disease in the program, or if they are only idiosyncracies and scratches that can be cured with some therapy and a few band-aids.