min-key and max-key should take lists

Clojure's min-key and max-key operators are variants of min and max that minimize or maximize some function of their arguments:

user=> (max-key count "Find" "the" "longest" "word")
"longest"

I used min-key a few times recently, and found it awkward every time, because the input arrived in a list, not in several separate expressions. Converting from one to the other is a simple matter of apply, but the resulting expression is not as clear as it ought to be:

user=> (apply min-key count
         (clojure.string/split "Find the shortest word" #" "))
"the"

It seems to me that while min and max are almost always used on separate arguments, min-key and max-key are much more likely to be used on lists. (In general, I think high-order functions are much more likely to be used on lists than their first-order relatives.) Googling clojure min-key supports this: almost all uses are (apply min-key ...), not (min-key ...) — and all of the latter seem to be either artificial examples or mistakes. Even the spelling corrector which was the original motivation for adding max-key uses it with apply. So these functions should really be provided in list form (like Arc's most) rather than separate-argument form.

This is a general problem, though. Any operator that takes an arbitrary number of arguments will probably be used sometimes on lists and sometimes on a few explicit arguments. apply or reduce are the obvious ways to transform one into the other, but they're rather disappointing when you're expecting a clear, convenient list function.

(Functions that aren't useful with only one argument (like min-key) can be overloaded to provide both: (min-key f xs) could operate on the elements of xs, while (min-key f a b) operates on a and b. This is what Python does. This is a potentially susprising irregularity, though ((min-key f a) no longer does what you expect), and it doesn't work for functions that can usefully take one argument. So I don't think it's a good idea.)