Okay, I think it’s a valuable use case.

(Out of curiosity, why don’t you want byte-compiled files on your system?  It speeds up imports, and problems due to the presence of stray pyc files when the py is deleted are gone in 3.2+.  Maybe you have custom tools to byte-compile, like Debian?)

Do you have any opinion about my renaming suggestion?
Without renaming, we’d have that:

  build --byte-compile --no-byte-compile --optimize-bytecode=[012]
  build_py --compile --no-compile --optimize=[012]

If we want to use the same name and make the names clearer, we could have:

  build(_py) --compile-pyc --no-compile-pyc --compile-pyo=[012]