It looks like for many people, the preferred solution is to disentangle array construction and concatenation ops. I agree with that. That idea has not gained traction in some years, although it should happen ASAP before 0.6/1.0 if it will ever happen …
A smaller improvement to the current situation along the above lines could be to make ; return a nx1 Array. That would make more sense to me, but it then seems to suggest changing vcat to return an nx1 Array. Thoughts?