I am certainly not in the business of writing my own shell parser ;) Though this is a fair point -- I think I could get a more rich level of control over the output by hooking into their parser, albeit with a higher level of complexity.
/shrug Something to think about. Usually I'd say not to worry about it, but this particular point seems to be actively causing actual problems, so it might be worth looking at. Alternatively, if the pain points you've discovered really are all there are to find, then it might well be less trouble to just patch over them specifically and not worry about it. Ugly solutions that work well and don't take extra work are good solutions in my book;)