The irony is that the constraint that you're talking about went away in the early 1980s when processors with more than just a single accumulator register became popular.
Sinclair QDOS is another, roughly contemporary but a few years earlier, example. The 68008 had far more general-purpose registers than the Z80, so the system call TRAPs in QDOS uniformly return an error code in D0 and up to three results in D1, D2, and D3.