You joke, but this is almost reasonable. When refactoring a large codebase riddled with strncpy, strcpy and strcmp, understanding unambiguously what code does shouldn't come down to my middle aged eyes being able to parse better than a compiler. I did a global search and replace with a #define, verified the object code diff'd against the original version, and never looked back.

As usual I'm joking but somewhat serious. Step one is better replacement functions. Step two actually should be make the bad ones feel sleezy.

One thing I think is the problem with making safer string functions is it's hard to do that while staying at the same very low level of abstraction. And I think a lot of code out there sets up string functions to work off incomplete information. (here is a pointer to a string buffer, trust me it's big enough to hold what you'll stuff in it)