I also don't like this, although it's no big deal, and it happens with a few other settings (e.g., 'number'). One way around it is to forget about using the 's

I also don't like this, although it's no big deal, and it happens with a few other settings (e.g., 'number'). One way around it is to forget about using the 'set' command entirely and to assign all settings using the setting variable directly. Every setting has a corresponding variable that can be accessed by prefixing with &, so to set paste off you can just do ':let &paste=0'.