a ton of work to figure out and implement

Not really?

  while ((opt = getopt(...)) >= 0) switch (opt) {
  ...
  case 'v':
      if (!action) { action = VERIFY; break; }
      verbose++; break;
  ...
  }

(A followup post clarifies that a -v before a different action flag does not retroactively turn into “verbose”; in any case that’s also not hard to do. To be clear, both possibilities suck, I just disagree they’re difficult to implement.)