An alternative to the babel package appears to be the betababel package. Betababel is considered to be a hack that munges the input encoding normally used by Babel, so that betacodes can be used to specify Greek letters. If/when Babel is updated then there's a strong possibility that the BetaBabel hack will stop working. Add to this that there's the use of the normally reserved TeX character "\" (backslash) and it's a good reason to avoid messing with this.