It's an educational problem, Chandler Caruth of LLVM gave a really good talk on POD type slicing and how useful it can be. More to the point that for PODs it's supported in the standard. I do agree on the abuse of pair... pair is there for implementers primarily and shouldn't be used outside of deliberately templated code. Ditto tuple.

That said... with C++17 destructuring... it's a lot less painful since you can do the equivalent to a std::tie in a single line.