Long before this ImageMagick overflow bug I've been wanting to ditch it completely in favor of GraphicsMagick (still hasn't happened). Aside from the usual bugs, arbitrary API changes and other endearing quirks, ImageMagick's greatest offense is how its utility programs have incredibly generic names like display and identify. GraphicsMagick does away with those by running everything through the gm command, so there's less confusion about what happens when you type gm identify somefile.jpg as you so often do.

This kind of thing is very common; cvs, svn and openssl (to name a few that I use often) all fit this pattern. Decent shells are aware of these programs' "subcommands" and will tab-complete them for you. But the chances that your shell's tab completion is an exact match with whatever version of, say, svn you're running are low. Maybe svn added a new command, but your shell completion doesn't know about it yet. Or maybe your shell completion has all the latest updates but you're stuck running an old version of svn that doesn't have it, allowing your tab completion to taunt you.

Imagine then if your shell was smart enough to detect directories in $PATH entries and gave them special treatment, looking for "subcommands" under them. Then svn could install itself under a directory called /usr/local/bin/svn/, where you'd have /usr/local/bin/svn/checkout, /usr/local/bin/svn/commit, /usr/local/bin/svn/log, etc. Instead of svn checkout you would run svn/checkout. And with a link from checkout to co you would still have your svn co shortcut. The commands themselves wouldn't necessarily need to look different; the shell could automatically translate svn co to svn/co for you and you might not even realize anything changed.

Update: Anonymous commentor made all kinds of good points (particularly about just using something like "gm-whatever") so this is a "nevermind".