@kirs can we leave the typecast API out for now? This will conflict with the work @sgrif want to do and it would maybe make harder to integrate.

The collection of changes to fix the issues we want to address would be probably of the same size, but it would make easier to review and merge if we could break this PR in many steps. I find it really hard to believe we need to change 170 lines in a single commit to be able to fix this issue. We probably could break the first commit in many commits, test the class better and that would give more confidence over what is being changed. Right now I see a huge diff, with a few assertions changes and no real reason why all those lines had to change.