CI4 lacks seems to lack a couple of super convenient CI3 features.

Re (2), is this what you are looking for? https://bcit-ci.github.io/CodeIgniter4/o...-reference
... specifically, the setVar and setData methods of any view or view parser.

Ah, automatically escaping variables, unless you explicitly tell it not to - that'll be super useful saving time having to what htmlspecialchar() around all the echo statements.