You'd have to add a variable to store their facing, a flag to indicate disorientation, the four new direction commands (each no more than a few lines of code) and add an extra check whenever a compass direction is displayed. It sounds like a fun little feature, perhaps even worth turning into a snippet, but it certainly doesn't require "sweeping surgical code changes to the deep core of the codebase".
However you do raise an interesting point; the value of directional movement commands can very much depend on the features of the game. In retrospect my original division of grid-based vs non-grid-based is a bit of an over-generalisation. For example (although I'm not sure if he was being serious or not), I could see Kastagaar's 26-directional movement suggestion being very useful in a mud which strongly emphasises 3D movement (eg a mud where everyone is a dragon, or a fish, etc), even though it might seem a bit OTT for most muds. Equally, Gromble's suggestion of named exits might fit very well in an RP mud which used a very small world, but could get uncomfortable if the player was expected to travel long distances (eg moving dozens - or even hundreds - of "rooms" to get to their destination).
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