I, too have found the type system to be a bit tedious at times, especially with Carbon. It also doesn't help that SourceKit crashes often while doing crazy things with types. I've just been reverting back to ObjC for these specific things (plus better error messages and tooling).

But looking back, the first versions of ObjC were also kind of tedious (no @property declarations, no blocks, etc) and it's gone a long way.