perhaps it could just work in a simple, consistent way?

in my original report i wondered whether there was a significant performance hit.  but so far the objections against fixing this seem to be (1) a lawyer could be convinced the current behaviour is consistent with the docs (2) python 3 should remain compatible with python 2 (3) abcmeta is the sucksorz.

those don't seem like great arguments against making it just work right, to me.