How to get bash to stop escaping $ during tab-completion

Once upon a time I could type

ls $HOME/f

and bash would expand this to whatever file started with 'f', or a list of all the candidates.

Now (2013 - and for quite some long irritating time) bash has been "improved" so that the above request shows:

ls \$HOME/f

which is completely useless.
(Who did that help?   What problem did it fix?)

The old behaviour can be restored by putting this in some bashrc, or executing it within bash:

shopt -s direxpand

... presuming that you have a sufficiently recent version of bash to have both the problem and the capacity to fix it. Sigh.