I don't get the problem with operator overloading. Yes, it can be implemented badly, but so can the equals() override. You can't even call a.equals(b) safely in many programming languages because either a or b could be null. I've run into so many null pointer exceptions in Java because someone wrote a.equals(b) when they clearly meant a!=null && a.equals(b).

Every time I have to write `BigDecimal sum = one.add(two).add(three).minus(four)` I cry a little. This is effectively no different from operator overloading and it's what special number implementations in all languages without operator overloading seem to end up doing out of necessity.