Yes, it's a gotcha, but it's not new; this behaviour has been around since at least 1997. It's unfortunate that people don't know about this issue, and it's equally unfortunate that timers are so error prone regarding evaluation-- but this issue is not a bug, it's behaviour by design.
Even if you do
//msg #$ME Hello it will only msg 'TehGrape' not #TehGrape so either way as I said it is a bug.
This is judging by the way #$1- works
