As a fellow spaces-in-filenames-hater, the fight is not lost. We are on the brink of winning it; it's just a mount option away!

While we cannot avoid that people hit the spacebar when writing a filename on a gui, this does not mean at all that the resulting filename itself need contain a plain space character. Those spaces can and should be transparently translated to non-breaking space characters at some point. Maybe by the gui itself, or more robustly by the filesystem. This would make everybody happy: gui users and naive shell script writers.