After getting over the hurdles I initially explained and moving forward, I've found that standard command-line parsing and its conventions are far too ingrained in the design of argparse to make it useful as a general command parser. I think I would end up overriding a substantial amount of the module to make it do what I want, and I would really rather not try to shoehorn one paradigm into another. Unfortunately, getopt provides none of the benefits I sought with argparse, and optparse is deprecated, so I will probably be rolling my own custom parser.
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