You are absolutely, completely correct. The two can certainly be reconciled! There is one possible complication, though. The two would need to be reconciled in

You are absolutely, completely correct. The two can certainly be reconciled! There is one possible complication, though. The two would need to be reconciled in the same way by everyone who wants to write a shell tool. Given that even fairly simple standards (RSS, HTML, etc.) cause lots of failures to comply, what are the odds of near-universal compliance in a larger and more diverse ecosystem like shell utilities?