Re: substitute-in-file-name and "$"

[Richard Stallman]

    But as long as file-name-directory, file-name-nondirectory,
    expand-file-name, etc. preserved text properties, the programmer
    would have to intentionally circumvent the feature.
    Unfortunately, those functions seem to remove text properties from
    their result (in the Emacs 21.3 release).

It would be quite a pain to make them preserve text properties
in general.  Anyway, I think we already have the right solution
to this problem.