Interesting! From what I'm reading so far, this seems not to be Illumos-specific (despite being motivated by Illumos's needs), but rather a cleanup that'd be applicable to any POSIX-like system. A fork of less that assumes POSIX-like functionality and cleans up a lot of things accordingly does seem like a worthwhile project. A bit more "unixy" design that uses the system versions of available functionality (like globbing and UTF-8!) should also reduce the risk of weird bugs & inconsistencies with how the rest of the system operates.
