There are perfectly good ways to provide this capability in a manner that has far fewer costs.
Not really. It's either some specialized tools (throwing away all environment uniformity benefits) or another layer of indirection (display name->real name->inode), with it's share of bugs (and having two close, often equal, but different identifiers won't make programming any less error prone).
shells to generate such meta-character-free identifies from richer display names
You still need to pass rich display names to shell, so old problems are still there, and, on top of that, consistent mapping of display names to real ones is required.
In this case, the cost was WAY too high
-- "$FOO" instead of $FOO, and ls -1 instead of ls?
(Not accounting for \n here, because in that case i agree on it's abysmal benefit/cost ratio and banning)
Not really. It's either some specialized tools (throwing away all environment uniformity benefits) or another layer of indirection (display name->real name->inode), with it's share of bugs (and having two close, often equal, but different identifiers won't make programming any less error prone).
shells to generate such meta-character-free identifies from richer display names
You still need to pass rich display names to shell, so old problems are still there, and, on top of that, consistent mapping of display names to real ones is required.
In this case, the cost was WAY too high
-- "$FOO" instead of $FOO, and ls -1 instead of ls? (Not accounting for \n here, because in that case i agree on it's abysmal benefit/cost ratio and banning)