OS Dead Weight: Common OS Features I'd Like to See Die

Modern OSes are a combination of intentional design and elements retained for historical or compatibility reasons. This kind of compromise is more or less inevitable, but it also leads to some unpleasant situations at times. These are a few such situations, common facets of modern OSes which, IMO, should be eliminated.

General OS Dead Weight

• File Extensions as File Type Encoding
  
  The use of the characters after the last dot in a filename as a representation of the file's type (that is, data organization, classification, means of interpretation, preferred "default application", etc.) is troublesome. Unfortunately, it's also difficult to get away from for interoperability reasons. I object to this antiquated mechanism for a variety of reasons. There's no system for allocating file-type extensions so they remain unique. Conceptually, the act of naming a file is distinct from the act of marking a file with instructions on what format its data is written in, and that information should survive any renaming operation. The practice of displaying file extensions has also fallen out of favor in GUI environments, and this has led to various subtle and not-so-subtle problems.
• Use of Text Formats as a Lengua Franca
  
  A whole pantheon of file formats these days are actually text files with some structure or syntax imposed upon them. The rationale is that such files are easier to view, or more convenient to read and write. To an extent, this is true, but only because nothing more powerful is standard enough to be used instead. Text files are inherently inefficient for many of the jobs for which they're being used: 8 byte numbers can be stored in about 20 bytes, for instance, and the complexity of the serialization and parsing processes is typically hidden by standard library code made to deal with textual data. We are trained to think textual data is easier to process because we've already been supplied with a wealth of tools (libraries, routines, horrendously overcomplicated editors, etc.) that deal with it. I contend that standard meta-formats for binary data are a better choice in the presence of adequate support utilities, and have the added benefit of making interoperatability with the data easier to achieve.

CLI-specific Dead Weight

• Backquotes and Backslashes
  
  Backquotes are used in Bourne Shell as a syntax for turning a command's output into another command's arguments. Backslashes are used on MS-DOS as directory path separators, and on Unix as an escape character. In both cases, they are visually similar to characters with different meanings ("normal" single or double quotes, forward slashes) which themselves have various meanings on the different platforms. The distinction between quotes and backquotes becomes especially problematic when using a proportional font for text display. Although backslashes and forward slashes are visually easy to tell apart, I expect there will be individuals who get them confused. I'd like to avoid the ambiguity and confusion of these forms.