Aaaarggh! But this appears to be a quirk of the treatment of scope with respect to directions, not of the object vs thing restriction created by ‘something preferably held’.
As noted elsewhere, directions are normally hard-coded as being in scope even though they fail the I6 routine TestScope(). Perhaps that’s the reason they are treated anomalously here.
Putting regions, rooms and directions explicitly into scope with ‘After deciding the scope of the player…’ (which mean they all pass TestScope()) allows all to be referenced by ‘something preferably held’.
EDIT: I guess Mr Nelson’s defence for not incorporating the hard-coding of scope for directions into ‘something preferably held’ would be that it’s not easy to conceive a situation where an action using this token might sensibly need to act on a direction. Although I’m sure someone could dream one up!