Funnily enough:
As an aside, have you tried non-fido icomplete? There is one simple change that makes it infinitely better in my opinion: fido forces a completion-style choice on you, icomplete gives you freedom to choose for yourself! (I shouldn't say so because I'm the author but I love the orderless completion-style: https://github.com/oantolin/orderless.)
I came to emacs-devel a few weeks ago for a way to use orderless in fido, and João kindly showed me:
(add-hook 'icomplete-minibuffer-setup-hook
(lambda ()
(setq-local completion-styles '(orderless partial-completion))))
Which makes fido-mode use different completion styles. So it’s not necessarily forced, it’s just not as easy as modifying a defcustom.
Cheers,
Andy
P.S. I’m replying from the digest for the first time, hoping the threading isn’t screwed up.