Yikes! Thanks for the heads up. I use the backtick in a lightweight markup language that I'm making but felt uneasy about that choice. Now I have impetus to change it.

How do people with those layouts survive in bash?

    $( command )

$() is better than `, because you can nest them (TBH, I probably haven't had a need for nesting them in the past year or so, but I remember vividly that a few times I needed it badly and would be lost if I only had `s)