I know from a purely academic perspective changing the path search
sounds like a wonderful concept.  But NetBSD is not Plan9, and
people do not expect to it be.  Changing the way path searches are
done for relative directories would not only potentially break
various and sundry UNIX based software built for NetBSD, but it
would be completely unexpected behavior to users who are not
concerned with making NetBSD into Plan9. :)  Whether it's more
elegant or not is pretty much moot.  I'm not a standards maven, so
I'll leave it up to others to list any XOpen, etc. standards that
apply to path searches.  All I know, is that it's been done the
current way for ages, and changing it would probably fuck up a
great number of people.

Ezra