I've tried and tried but I've never found a situation where explicit lifetimes was the answer. It's almost always more complex than that. I mean, everywhere that is complex enough that implicit lifetimes don't work is also too complex for explicit lifetimes and almost always required Rc or Arc to solve it. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like there are so many other missing topics the Rust Book could be spending time on that would be more effective than teaching about explicit lifetimes.
There are a lot of situations where explicit lifetimes are the answer, TBH. However, you have to have a very good working model of lifetimes in order to get the annotations right.
I wrote a parser that needed it. But yeah for the most part whenever explicit lifetimes came into the picture it means that I have made some sort of mistake and need to rethink my approach.
