this was a classical example of a muddled and messed-up design,
driven just by the fact that I wanted to "spare" some functions,
with the net effect of writing more functions, plus a proxy class
plus create a lot of confusion for the reader.
This was easy to resolve though, once I resorted to the
general adivice to make public interface methods final,
make the extension ponts protected and never
to chain two extension points
now we use boost::format through our own front-end util::_Fmt
solely, which both helps to reduce compilation time and code size,
and gives us a direct string conversion, which automatically
uses any custom operator string() available on arguments.
While desirable as such, I did this conversion now, since
it allows us to get rid of boost::str, which in turn helps
to drill down any remaning uses of our own util::str
