Yup, that's good in the spirit of DESTRUCTURE.
Using blanks in these cases to mean "match anything" makes me wonder if that should be the meaning of blank in parse in general...and switch over to # for space in strings (it now is the space character literal) and use '_ to match blanks in lists.
It's been up in the air a long time. My ambition to make _ what's used for spaces in string dialects has driven the current leaning, but, now that # is space, I guess I can live with that.
>> refinement-rule: [subparse chain! ['_ word!]] ; would require the quote
>> parse [:foo] [refinement-rule]
== foo
It seems that if unquoted blank is literal in some pattern matching places and not others, that just gets confusing.