but boy are Strings convenient, easy to use, etc for novices like myself.
If you look at the String source and header files, you'll find that there is nothing magic about the class. A couple of days experimenting with all the functions defined in the string.h file will enable you to understand how to do all the stuff that the String class does, without the overhead of dynamic memory allocation. After all, there are really very few cases where a fixed length string doesn't make more sense.