Sure, it's ugly, and you're right that this can only be used by one plugin, but I don't see any better way; neither do you. It's especially bad that we have to integrate before and after the original functionality, so submitting a patch to the original ftplugin.vim would be ugly and a special just for this plugin, not nice.

I'm pragmatic about this: I don't know of any other plugin that needs this hack, and if there were, and many users would want to use them both, we would surely find out, and then this momentum could be channeled into a patch for more integration points in the original ftplugin, and Bram would probably accept this based on the shown user needs. Both disputed plugins would incorporate the new integration point, and could in the future work together. But until that conflict actually happens, I'd rather spend my energy elsewhere, especially because we can only _guess_ where exactly in ftplugin.vim a conflict would actually happen.