Refactor strings working

So the reason I chose to do it this way was because of how tightly coupled the merging is with the expected output of a string.  So, when merging doesn't have any conflicts I chose to default to a string so that the merging doesn't have to be rewritten (and potentially introduce errors).  When merging does conflict, the parts that are coupled to string outputs are not used.  It does make it cleaner to use a consistent output, but I thought that overall there was more benefit to not having to rewrite all the merging.  What do you think?