I might be learning C++, but I'm not learning programming. I know code smell when I see it.

But then, no need to argue, because you can see the result for yourself (I'm pretty far in the cleaning process). I've just pushed the "de-templatization" of the stream related functions (at http://bitbucket.org/hsoft/bitcoin-clean/changeset/ffcfc79e29f0 ). The code still works well (I haven't touched the code per se, just its structure, so I doubt I introduced bugs) and it compiles significantly faster (yeah yeah, templates makes compilation slow).