I would just like to add, as simply as possible, that my experience
working on Slate with prototypes and treating every object as a late-bound
exemplar has been very satisfactory: I use all the class-side constructor
selectors (newFoo) that one would expect, but the template is always the
receiver.

Since the template is a receiver, the logic for construction can be much
more generic; I haven't yet encountered a need for #initialize or its ilk.
The closest need has been for opening and closing external resources.

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
http://tunes.org/~water/