As I understand it, you prefer memoryviews where the format is
purely informational, whereas we now have typed memoryviews.

Typed memoryviews are certainly useful, in fact they are
present in Cython, see here for examples:

http://docs.cython.org/src/userguide/memoryviews.html


I can see only one obvious benefit of ignoring the format: All possible
formats are accepted. What I don't understand is why this ...

  m[0] = b'\x00\x00\x00\x01'

... should be preferable to:

  m[0] = 1



If you think that typed memoryviews are a mistake, I suggest raising
the issue on python-dev as soon as possible (3.3 is due soon). All
memoryview operations are now based on values instead of bit patterns,
see for example #15573.