I am going to close this as superseded by #9527.  All these issues, current, #9527, and #1647654 are really about Python's lack of access to the system timezone information and #9527 seem to be the most appropriate solution.

My specific concern about proposed time.utcoffset() is that you normally need UTC offset together with current time, but localtime() call followed by utcoffset() may lead to a race condition.