David, that won't work for a reason I'll get into in a bit.

I would drop the priority of this ... Komodo has a had a
Python debugger since late 2000, we only fixed updating
variables while debugging (using the variable viewer) yesterday,
and received fewer than 10 complaints about that over the years.

While looking at the code, something seemed wrong with our
handling of the variables in the interactive shell.  I tested
it, and it failed, and then wrote the standalone Python code
to isolate the problem.

Your solution will work sometimes, but not completely.  When
you're in interactive mode while debugging, you can type arbitrary
Python code, but can also use the variable viewer in the UI to change
variables.  These two functions are handled by different code
paths.

My recommendation is to resolve this as a limitation, and
document the module.