a c standard library would indeed be useful. you're right that the average user will not produce faster code, maybe i exaggerated a bit; but i hope you're getting my point? 10000 lines of code is not much. if you're serious about game development, you should be able to do such stuff for yourself.
still, the main point was not about how fast your hashtable is, but that people are happy about how fast they can code the simplest things. but it's the hard, the really hard things where c# can draw all its trumps. delegates, events, object-oriented coding, databases, exception handling, stuff you _could_ emulate in c but which produces huge code files and requires strict code writing, not to mention the external libraries you would have to include. that's the real advantage of c# (part of it also applies to c++), and i had the impression that people don't see that as an advantage but merely the fancy look of their extremely elegant entity creation (just an example).
in my opinion, the reason why c# is so popular is the preinstalled .net framework on windows machines, the huge library, the free development tools and the relatively loose strictness of the language which makes it suitable for people who haven't learnt a low level language and who just want to get instant results.
