This kind of just sounds like more standard crazy unix/linux "someone did the wrong thing and now everyone's doing the wrong thing and it's too late to realisti

This kind of just sounds like more standard crazy unix/linux "someone did the wrong thing and now everyone's doing the wrong thing and it's too late to realistically fix", for which it's easier to just come up with another subversion (waves at the three different 'user' solutions) like not just building a user home dir, but creating a dir inside that the user's usename as well, so that ~ is for all the bullshit dotfiles and ~/yourusername is actually your data. And then someone will no doubt come up with an alias that takes you to that dir instead of just the original homedir, like "cd `" instead of "cd ~" (and no, ~ doesn't make any more sense than ` would, it's just what we got used to)