I think the reason the chained tracebacks look backward to me is twofold: I'm used to the last one in the list being the *only* one I get (in python2), and the last one in the list is often the one I want to deal with first.  This is especially true if my try/except is transforming the more-specific-but-not-application-meaningful exception into one that is meaningful for the application.

So another possibility would be to reverse the order in which the tracebacks are printed, and instead of saying "during the handling of the above exception...", we'd say "this exception occurred during the handling of the following exception:".  Doing this would probably greatly reduce the desire for a way to suppress the traceback chaining.