>> FWIW, I too do not see why ` would be "ugly".  I attach screenshots of 
>> what that character looks like in ten popular programming fonts; each 
>> shows the nine (!) possible conventions, together with the Unicode 
>> quotes.
>
> This shows that Unicode quotes consistently look good, while the others 
> look antiquated at best.  The single apostrophes on both sides ('like 
> this') is also okay, but still worse from a typographic standpoint.
>

Others might have a different opinion, depending on the font they use.

>> What would perhaps be welcome is a user option to ask Emacs to display 
>> apostrophes as acutes in `foobar' (and possibly another option to ask 
>> Emacs to use `´ instead of ‘’ in messages, errors and help buffers).
>
> Are you looking for `text-quoting-style'?
>

Not really.  Part of what I suggest would be solved with another option to 
text-quoting-style.  What we have no is ‘this’, 'this' and `this'.  What 
we could add is `this´.  And the other part of what I suggest is to have, 
say, a buffer-quoting-style option, which would have the same effect in 
regular buffers as the text-quoting-style in help buffers.