Rudder

Several places in the system techniques are currently over complicated and could greatly benefit from being cleaned up and simplified. I'm opening this ticket because I just spent a good half hour trying to understand what looked to me like a broken piece of code, just to figure out that is was a redundant declaration, reproducing complexity already handled elsewhere.

I aim to add several sub-tickets to this meta ticket to fix items little by little. We can close this when 2.12 is ready to be released.