Maybe simpler, but better? Probably not so much. I wanted red-blacks on a project that couldn't use STL, and found that porting STLPort's <map> red-black to C-with-void*'s was pretty straightforward. Didn't even have to write and debug a red-black tree: <map> is bulletproof.
In hindsight that would have made a lot of sense :-) at the time we had looked at STL, but getting it to work across Debian and Win2k (which is what SL was running on at the time) looked like a PITA. Didn't even think about porting STL, especially since skiplists were so simple to implement.
