>Maybe the solution is to make what I was trying to do easier without
>fooling with the shell instead of playing the fool's game of trying to
>improve the ability to deal with the shell so we can pass things
>through it unnecessarily.

You are too harsh for yourself :) We should be able to make use of shell easily the same way it's possible in other languages like Perl or Ruby.

>It sure would be nice on Windows to have an equivalent of
>list2cmdline() that works for the shell.

I agree. See issue 13238 for a list of libraries which make is easier to use shell from Python.