Yeah, I wasn't really sure about this. It seemed to be the path of least resistance, but if you want to write make-directory, which-os, and so forth (or their more primitive components) in Scheme and get rid of $, go for it.
There is still seval, right? You could use seval rather than $ in the stable branch, since it won't have to be updated except for arcn releases and bug fixes, so maintenance won't be too much of a problem. And it doesn't require writing entirely new library functions to implement.
