Is this ever needed?  I'm not sure whether all these patches are being driven by reasonable use cases or whether it is just something that could be done.

I thought the whole point of the views was to avoid copying.  If so, there is a design principle that says roughly, "take things you want users to do and make them easy and fast, while leaving undesirable patterns in a less comfortable state".  We don't have to break the copying and deepcopying, but we don't need to go out of our way to make them more efficient unless that is what we want users to be doing.