For the conversion from test_main() to unittest.main(), I could certainly see automation helping a lot; most cases are very simple.  But really, that issue is somewhat tangential to this one and in my last message I was thinking from the perspective of just the 80 or so modules that completely fail test discovery otherwise.  I believe that trying to automate those would be more trouble than it's worth.  Especially if issue 16935 is fixed, as that will knock out most of the tests I listed above that failed to skip properly.