I decided to put together my own class to do the job, starting with an easy, low-overhead way to move bytes in and out of arbitrary buffers. Along the way, it picked up useful bits and pieces, such as buffer structures and allocators that made the byte shuffling faster, often being able to do it with zero allocations and zero copies. Safety features came along to make sure that malicious packet data or mistakes in the code wouldn't result in segfaults or vulnerabilities.

It's become useful enough to me that I've packaged it up in its own standalone library on the chance that it might be useful to others. It has zero dependencies other than the standard library and has been designed for quick integration into any project within minutes, or seconds with a copy paste of the amalgamated header. It can be used in production code but it's also ideal for for those that want to quickly hack away at binary data with minimal fuss.