[tex-live] "Can't find font" : which step(s) have I overlooked ?

[Karl Berry]

    I think the "different behaviour based on executable name" trend 

It's not a "trend", it's a historical fact.

I am not a fan of it either, as a matter of principle.  But I also don't
see any harm in it, when there are options to achieve the same behavior.

    in TeX world is really a bad idea and should die,

It will never die.  latex, pdflatex, etc., as executable names that one
can type are obviously not going to go away.  And having them be links
is much cleaner than wrapper scripts.

As for getnonfreefonts, Reinhard was following the pattern established
for fmtutil, etc., of course.  Perhaps we should not have started with
that -sys suffix, but just used a --sys option, but it's too late now.