Oh I hate that paradigm. Well, maybe chmod and ls rsync and curl all do they OWN thing very well but every time I am using one of those tools I have to remember if i.e. more detailed response is -v or maybe -vvv or --verbose or -x for some reason because maintainer felt like it at 2:32 in the morning 17 years ago... Some consistency would help, but... Probably it is impossible the flame war over -R being recursive or read-only would never end.