I can appreciate your enthusiasm, but it is not as simple as that. It is not as much a CIFS issue as a php issue. The '$' is a reserved character in php. I did some testing with your proposed fixes and there were many issues. I remember now why I implemented the block of the '$' character.
In my testing, the '$' character in the mount point caused the ping of the server for online status to fail, and when I removed the remote share with a '$' in the mount point, all the remote shares I had defined were deleted.
The '$' in the mount point is a edge case and not something care to resolve.
EDIT: It isn't the mount point that's the issue, it's the share name.