Interesting take. As a hobbyist, I get special characters and escapes wrong in systemd all the time, because they try to look like regular shell but aren't. And systemd-escape (or whatever it's called) just makes an ugly mess that makes it hard for me to read.

I don't know lisp, but the idea of having each argument be part of a list (kind of like launchd's xml format) resonates with me.