Maybe bind is easier than I think; maybe it's just a few readline calls. I haven't looked into it.
But also, I noticed almost no shell scripts use extended globs like @(foo|bar), whereas the bash-completions package uses them EVERYWHERE. Completion scripts are almost like a different dialect than other shell scripts.
If you want to source /etc/bashrc on most distros, you're going to end up with thousands and thousands of lines of plugins from the bash-completions project.
The parsing is a big headache, but I think it forced me to learn how people use shell, which will benefit Oil.
It's been a full year since our alternative shells thread... might be time to revive it and see what's changed! Congrats on the Elvish releases!