Tom, note that nobody is arguing that what you are requesting is a bad thing :)

As far as I know, Matthew is the only one currently working on the regex support in Python.  (Other developers will commit small fixes if someone proposes a patch, but no one that I've seen other than Matthew is working on the deeper issues.)  If you want to help out that would be great.

And as far as this particular issue goes, yes the difference between the narrow and wide build has been a known issue for a long time, but has become less and less ignorable as unicode adoption has grown. Martin's PEP that Matthew references is the only proposed fix that I know of.  There is a GSoc project working on it, but I have no idea what the status is.