[baz00]

I think you're reading me wrong.

I spent a good deal of time working on SunOS (right back to m68k stuff), Solaris, HP/UX, Linux and FreeBSD over the years and use macOS now and am more than aware of the inconsistencies.

My point is that we pretty much standardised on some basic semantics around each command and what is portable and what is not. And now we're considering moving away from those learnings back to the wild west again.

I consider GNU to be a particularly bad variety of the wild west here for reference. I'm old enough to have been fucked by the differences between gawk and awk.