Maybe they could have designed it to have the ability to do it either way, i.e. based on a flag of some sort, the Windows either parses the args (does the shel

Maybe they could have designed it to have the ability to do it either way, i.e. based on a flag of some sort, the Windows either parses the args (does the shell-level interpretations such as of quotes and other metacharacters), or does not; in either case, it then passes the (parsed or unparsed) args to the command. That flag would have to be understood and acted on by Windows, though, not the individual commands, since the action has to happen (or not) before the commands gets the args. Might be clunky, not thought through the idea in detail.