Ah, I think we have a misunderstanding here: from my point of view, objects earlier in the list have lower precedence to objects later in the list. ^^ So your "lower precedence" is my "higher precedence". Basically, it has to do with stuff like:
foo!bar:qux!quux
which is compiled as:
{{foo ! bar} : {qux ! quux}}
So !, which is listed later, has higher precedence (it gets grouped more tightly)
