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Still here -- sorry not to reply sooner.  I couldn't
actually remember what my patch was supposed to do, or more
specifically I couldn't remember what it did to check that
this sort of change in __bases__ was safe.  So, anyway, I
finally got around to looking at the patch again, and at
typeobject.c, and I can say that I'm less sure of the
subtleties involved now than I was then.  Anyway, with that
caveat, what you suggest sounds reasonable enough, though I
suppose you'd have to reinsert a dict descriptor if
__bases__ was later changed back to (object,).  (It looks
like the patch would have supported changing __bases__ back
to (object,), though perhaps it shouldn't.)

It seems to me nobody is particularly troubled by this
limitation on assignment to __bases__ (perhaps you know
differently?).  Maybe it's best just to close this as "not a
bug."