If we go that direction then we really should just use numpy arrays as there will just be excessive type conversions. I don't think they're necessarily unintuitive for students:

```python
>>> from numpy import array
>>> s = array(list("ATGC"))
>>> s
array(['A', 'T', 'G', 'C'],
      dtype='|S1')
>>> s[:2]
array(['A', 'T'],
      dtype='|S1')
>>> ''.join(s)
'ATGC'
```