Your system is basically the same. pass is not a "complete application", but it's actually just a tiny shellscript. (RTFA...). You have to reenter the master password if that's the way GPG is setup. Or you don't have to reenter it, if it's set up that way instead.
Anyway, perhaps this is appealing to you:
alias p="pass"
Check out the source of pass -- it's probably pretty similar to your bash aliases. In fact, pass for me used to be a bash alias too.
Scanned the article twice and it wasn't until I read the source that I saw that it was a shell script.
That is the headline feature IMO (rather than 'standard')
edit: I should add that what gave me the impression of this being an application rather than something I would really use was the way it was presented with 'install', makefiles etc. rather than 'here are 30 lines of bash you can dump into your rc file'
Cool! Hmm yea - maybe I should highlight that it's just a shell script somewhere.
I already say " It is a very short and simple shell script. " in the first paragraph. Maybe I should say something else too. Thinking...
Edit: responding to your edit: Yea, there's a lot of cruft that gets added to a source directory when you try and make anything on Linux into something suitable for /usr/bin and /usr/share/man. C'est la vie.
Anyway, perhaps this is appealing to you: alias p="pass"
Check out the source of pass -- it's probably pretty similar to your bash aliases. In fact, pass for me used to be a bash alias too.