I still don't think the current idiom is problematic, so I'm -0.8 on the whole thing :-)

I'm with Antoine. I don't find it particularly onerous to type (how often do you start a new program/script from scratch anyway?), and if it was a big enough barrier, I'd capture the keystrokes in an Emacs macro (including skeletal main and usage functions, and corresponding imports of sys and os modules). I trust vim users could do something similar. Skip