Indeed it is an ugly feature that doesn't make it obvious as to what it does. Talked to Mich about it yesterday when I saw this change come through and we're in agreement that the string accessors need to be rethinked. Specifically ._ and .count in particular don't do what you expect them to do, particularly .count in all other languages return character count instead of word count like TorqueScript does at this time in T2D.

Anyway, if I can get the time to look into the string accessors I'll try to rework them to be more intuitive and obvious.