I'm not sure myself what I need right now.  I personally have avoided importlib/imp entirely for my code and I roll with manual module creation because it is most stable between 2.6 - 3.4 but it's getting more complicated to work because of all the new attributes (__package__, __spec__ etc.).

This particular case came from SQLAlchemy I believe (I tried to help Mike Bayer transition his code).

It's true that create() is the wrong function, load() is actually what should have been used there.