Hi Alexey - I'm sympathetic to the problem but don't see a good solution from this side. The ht executable has been since the beginning of tex4ht -- 15 years or so. I don't want to remove it now at this late date. If Eitan had asked me in 1999 I would have told him "no two-letter names", but he didn't :). (Ditto the HT Editor people -- any project thinking it can use a two-letter command name at this point in Unix's history is, IMHO, just plain wrong.)
What distros choose to do is not up to me, but I don't want to remove ht from TeX Live. (CVR, if you have any ideas on this, of course please let me know.) Best, karl