You can take Ian Coleman's tool for example, tell it to ignore the BIP39 checksum check and swap the word "mnemonic" for the word "electrum", and it will recover standard English Electrum seed phrases just fine.
Yeah, you're right. I guess I'm just too strict about the code I write/use and "ignore" doesn't work for me. I have to have every little details about the algorithm implemented correctly and fully tested before I can use it.