I give up on trying to find common ground conceptually, because either there's something fundamental I'm not understanding, or I am not clearly communicating my point of view. In my reading we're both just repeating ourselves.
But I don't think it matters, since I think it's clear that a) you're not prepared to change the default in this case, which I sympathise with; and b) you have proposed a design for a solution that will work fine for the use case I've championed (specifically, your proposal for `force-meta-prefix`). Thanks very much for taking the time to think this through and work out a solution! -- https://rrt.sc3d.org