True, though any other way you'd still pretty much be required to use double control codes, as using reverse or underline will cause just the "space" itself to appear as either an underline on it's own, or a reverse color block.

<u> <u> <u> <u>Text, for example will give you something that looks a lot like: _ _Text.

Though I suppose if you were against using the spaces.dll idea, you could /strip +r, and //echo -r text $chr(2) $chr(2) $chr(2) $chr(2) text, and then you could use single reverse/underline codes.