Well, they have to be Optionals one way or another, because they can't get hooked up until after init[0], and Swift won't allow that. But yeah, I imagine this is on someone's todo list somewhere. IB already knows whether things are connected properly, and actually so does the source editor, since it shows the little circles in the gutter.

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[0] Unless you could invert the order of the unarchiving...not sure what difficulties that would cause.