I find this version much cleaner! Looks good to me.

What I'd really like to see later is if we can write some unit tests for these conversions. Not mtr linked tests but actual unit tests specifically using these Items. I am up for chipping in and writing some myself.

One thing I'd like to discuss later in the context of reentrant functions are these side effects such as "return (null_value= true);" when fetching data from an Item. I think they should go from base items and only perhaps happen in "cache" items. We can potentially then turn all these methods to be const methods.

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