Oh, nice, you have addressed exactly what I was asking for. Hmm, but question... Why not do this? I mean, you mention that it's not the only way, but this seems to work and doesn't require anything like gensymming.
I guess the advantage of your approach is that you can choose to only import the functions you want. If that's particularly important for some reason, then, sure, do it. But I suspect it might actually be useful to import the entire module, especially at the REPL when you're just starting out using it. Particularly if you have a "scheme apropos" function.
I added the "sort <" part just now, by the way. Can't believe I didn't think to do that originally (though I did at least add it to the "aps" thing somewhat earlier).
There was something or other that wasn't working when using $ directly because it was Racket-specific and it didn't work in Arc's mzscheme module. I forget now what it was though. (Clearly parse-xml is a bad example as it does work with a simple require).