Plan 9 extensions would only require enough examples to justify and might not take years. Though your taking years assessment would be right if there's a dearth of kernel spots to add up where automatic pointer conversion for anonymous fields, or using the typedef name to access them, offer some improvement, not necessarily even a huge improvement.

Since with the Microsoft extension, it was just waiting until enough examples were woven into the discussion to overcome the back and forth that was preventing "biting the bullet".