An interesting post - thanks for it.
If you are writing your own STL might I suggest studying the design of Electronic Art's STL?
https://rawgit.com/electronicarts/EASTL ... 20FAQ.htmlhttps://github.com/electronicarts/EASTLThey took the position of adding intrusive lists where the amount of memory allocated in significantly reduced. Also they made memory management and custom allocators much easier to implement allowing, for example, a list to be bound to a pool allocator - thus moving the decision making of how to deal with non-fixed size allocations to an allocator rather than the list its self.
One extremely useful aspect of better allocators for STL is you can emit events tracking allocations by container type, data type, etc...
The tool EA developed to work with EASTL is described here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KIvWJUYbDAEASTL is well worth a study and I highly encourage it.
Good luck with your project
Cheers