What the heck are you talking about? The XDG basedir spec is three variables. The user dir spec is more but those are not environement variables.

So that's not any fault of XDG, that's you forcing applications to use it when they apparently don't support it natively. That's either 15 or 19 lines of application bugs.

Reread what I said, "apps should just use xdg out of the box"

No, you said "when your xdg list gets huge, apps should just use xdg out of the box". But the link you shared shows only 4 lines in your xdg list. 4 lines is hardly huge.

Why should I have to maintain a list of applications that don't conform to the standard? I tried to, and the list keeps growing. I'm done screwing around with it, I don't care how cluttered my homedir gets anymore.