Streams are quite ugly.  However, if you decompose streams into all of 
the little pieces that are needed to emulate them, the pieces are quite 
nice.

For instance, inheriting stat data from a common parent is nice, and 
inheritance is nice, and being able to cat dirname/pseudos/cat and get a 
concatenation of all of the files is nice, and being able to cat 
dirname/pseudos/tar and get an archive of the directory is nice, and, 
well, if you decompose all of the features of streams into little 
features you get a bunch of fun little features much nicer than streams.

Hans