Maybe I can find the time to make a patch this weekend (either today or tomorrow). I hope I'm not underestimating this somehow, but I don't think this would take too long. The only issue I can foresee is in disagreement of what the correct behavior should be, which is why I gave my opinion that a single call of parse_args() should only ever remove a single "--".
If I don't submit a patch by Monday (PDT), everyone should assume I decided not to tackle this.
By the way, does this issue tracking platform support submitting to the issue thread by email? Maybe, I'll try that.