Maybe a better starting point is to monkey-patch via setuptools? I know it's nasty, but it'll give us a chance to actually iterate on this before committing to a distutils change. (IMO the biggest problem with distutils is that it gets basically no testing before a final release, other than people who have already worked around its issues.) CCompiler.spawn is fairly easy to patch too.

Adding Jason in case he's still so upset from last time I did this (finding VC compiler for 2.7) he wants to shut the suggestion down immediately :)

As an aside, escaping quotes by doubling them (as in the OP) works fine for MSVC, but is not necessarily standard across all applications. Escaping with a backslash is probably more common, but (e.g.) batch files don't need them escaped if they aren't followed by a space and can't escape them at all if they are followed by a space (then again, we all agree that cmd.exe is fundamentally broken here, so using https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb776391.aspx (CommandLineToArgvW API) as the benchmark is reasonable).