I think its good to get to a point where we don't have to worry much about backwards compatibility. IMHO, the easiest way to do that is embed library and other settings in each patch rather than having libraries loaded by default. The pow~ issue highlights that.
You can also already use naming schemes like cyclone/prepend, iemlib/ prepend, etc.
.hc
That however does not solve problems like help files not being found (at least no here) and/or not knowing which one is being loaded by default (e.g. scale object is by default from Gem lib, so when you load the maxlib version and right-click on its help, you still get Gem lib one).
Ico