> Anyway, here's a new version of my patch. Let me know what you think.

I don't see any obvious problems with it but I don't know how to
construct a test case for any of the helpers you've edited.  It would
be nice to know that this does not break the un-edited versions of
those helpers, because if those changes are required rather than just
redundant code removal, other helpers in the wild would also require
editing.