>
> I don't think the ` character is "ugly" -- that Markdown (for instance) 
> uses it for similar purposes (but as `...`) shows that it's a character 
> that people are comfortable with using in semi-structured non-plain-text 
> files like source code files.
>

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. 
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).