Yes, I tend to agree. I’ve thought about this every time this topic is posted and it’s posted fairly regularly. I personally like the second option you mentioned, avoiding the WP meta data functions entirely. I also know that Elliot tries as you say “to do things the WP way”. The third option I know is really out because that would pretty much eliminate the ability to use standard functions in place of acf functions, get_post_meta(), get_option() and the like, which is also something that the developer wants to avoid. Back in the beginning he worked very hard trying to figure out how to save repeater field and flex field rows in the standard WP fashion before he decided on the current solution because there was no way in WP to keep the fields of each row associated properly.
I think that until one of us that has the ability to do so creates some type of fast save add on, or E finally finds many hours of time and the desire to do it, that we’re not going to see it.
I do think that it is possible, I’ve thought about it and looked into it a bit. If you have an acf/save_post action that run before ACF and you use some other method for inserting and updating all the meta data and then you clear the $_POST[‘acf’] value, this will pretty much bypass ACF and cause it to do nothing. The real problem comes in when you try to do all that updating yourself, that’s the tricky part. If I had the time to do it I would. And then you also need to account for all of the ACF add on fields that have been created. It’s really no small task or to maintain.
