Glenn, you have reached a point where you stop bike-shedding and start to troll by attacking people. Please calm down. I'm sure that you are just worried about the future of Python and all the bad things, that might be introduced by a fix for the issue.

Please trust us! Paul, Victor, Antoine and several more involved developers are professional Python devs and have been for years. Most of them do Python development for a living. We won't kill the snake that pays our bills. ;) Ultimately it's Guido's choice, too. 

Martin:
Ouch, the startup impact is large! Have we reached a point where "one size fits all" doesn't work any longer? It's getting harder to have just one executable for 500ms scripts and server processes that last for weeks.

Marc-Andre:
Have you profiled your suggestion? I'm interested in the speed implications. My gut feeling is that your idea could be slower, since you have added more instructions to a tight loop, that is execute on every lookup, insert, update and deletion of a dict key. The hash modification could have a smaller impact, since the hash is cached. I'm merely speculating here until we have some numbers to compare.