Wait, --help should print to stdout so that

    fancycommand --help | less

works as expected. Otherwise, the help text will dump to the screen and less will erase it when it decides to redraw its empty buffer! Actual error messages should go to stderr so that I can redirect them to an error log or so I can suppress them if need be, or I could also be doing > /dev/stdout to silence normal output but I don't want errors to be discarded.

I agree. When a program is given the --help option, the usage information is the actual output.

It allows users to easily separate messages intended for the user from output which can be consumed by other scripts.

  $ tens.sh --verbose 5
  10
  100
  1000
  10000
  100000
  Calculated 5 results

  $ tens.sh --verbose 5 > results
  Calculated 5 results