Rust makes heavy use of custom pointers filling the gap (& going beyond) between references (&T and &mut T) and raw pointers (*const T and *mut T). Currently, they have two major issues: ergonomics and feature parity with builtin references and Box<T>. Raw pointers and their extensions (e.g. NonNull<T>) have especially bad ergonomics. We are working on proposing the Field Projection language feature that aims to remedy these shortcomings of custom (dumb & smart) pointers. Our current approach is an ambitious generalization of Deref that supports a plethora of custom pointers from MyBox<T> (that has all the properties of Box<T>) to VolatilePtr<T> (which is only using {read,write}_volatile to access the pointee). Our proposal integrates tightly with existing features such as place expressions, operations on places, the borrow-checker, and autoref. Field Projections was a project goal in 2025H2 and is very likely to continue in 2026. In the last few months we have made incredible progress and want to involve greater parts of the community.