I agree that the brew devs are not stupid or lazy (as can be seen by the great popularity of the tool they developed among the complaining demographic). I susp

I agree that the brew devs are not stupid or lazy (as can be seen by the great popularity of the tool they developed among the complaining demographic). I suspect they are wrong in this specific care based on the "every other package manager solved this" heuristic, but I have no doubt this is not a straightforward issue. Personally, I dropped the case after offering to send a PR and getting back a "we won't accept this, it's not because we didn't think of it, from where we're standing it's a bad idea". They may or may not be wrong, but X am definitely wrong here, knowing almost nothing about it.