I'm hoping someone can help me clear up this issue, and by association help anyone else having problems with this.

While listening to a beta tester's feedback, he was complaining that none of the characters in the game would talk to him. I later discovered this was because he was using the "Speak to" display verb, which I didn't use in the game, but instead have a custom command. I have since removed the "Speak to" display verb, but what I would like to do now is add a display verb for my custom command, however I haven't been able to figure this out. The reason it doesn't work is because the pattern I have set up for my command is

ask #object# about alibi

And the default behavior of the display verbs is to append the object to the end of the command, so if you click it, it comes out as

ask about alibi #object#

I can't seem to find a way to customize how individual display verbs work. Is this even possible without modifying the core libraries?

Yes, this is a problem I thought about several times. I think it's right that displayverbs always evaluates 'verb #object#'. It would be brilliant if there would be something like displaycommands, something like this:
There is an object named 'crane' with displayverbs 'move left', 'move right', 'move up' and so on (no problem to do this). But this crane has an crane magnet, which can be switched on and off. If you add a displayverb 'switch on' Q5 will print and evaluate 'switch on crane' which is not correct.
It would be great to have the possibility to add 'switch on magnet' to the popupmenu of the crane, which displays this text in the gamewindow and executes this command.
I think this could also be used if you want to create a game without a commandline, only handled with the mouse. It's not possible to call commands like 'look', 'inventory', 'help' etc with the mouse at the moment.