> all your problems go away. Well, save the spaces, that's never going to happen.
Spaces in filenames are fine. The only strange thing is that, as it turns out, shells have this hidden easter-egg/anti-feature where you can actually leave out the quotes around filenames under certain, special edge-case scenarios. One of those is when the filename contains no ampersands, quotation marks, asterisks, dollar-signs, parentheses, backslashes, newlines, or, you guessed it, spaces! In fact, this special "no quote mode" also contains another special, embedded mode where you can still use those characters, but put backslashes before them! Since this layering of tricks leads to funky, confusing-looking commands, it's obviously much better to just stick with the regular mode of quoting everything.
Of course, the above is quite tongue-in-cheek, but its the mental-mode I specifically try to adopt: "occasionally, you might get away with leaving out the quotes"; compared to the seemingly more common "you need to add quotes in these cases".
Still, this doesn't eliminate the problem of single-quotes in filenames never going away! Whilst it only requires one character code to be escaped, it's still accomplished in a pretty funky way: "'" becomes "'\''"; we first close the string, then use a backslash to write a literal "'", then we start a new string ;)