[Raymond]

> Also, it gets in the way of the end-user strategy of "backslash anything that looks special"

That's not a good strategy in the first place, though: adding an extra backslash for something that doesn't need to be escaped isn't benign - it's usually an error, since it puts that backslash into the resulting string.

    >>> "abc\`d" == "abc`d"
    False

In other words, it seems to me that getting in the way of this broken end-user strategy is a *good* thing, since it warns of possible mistakes.