I think programmatic deprecation is actually fine since that only comes up when running under -W which would be a bit odd for any tool to be run under except when testing. E.g. I had no personal issue deprecating imp for Python 3.4 even though that's the only way to do 2/3 programmatic import craziness as its use should be discouraged as much as possible since it's now fundamentally the wrong paradigm. And the tools can simply silence the deprecation if they actually find it noisy.

I do agree it should just be a PendingDeprecationWarning and not expect to remove it until either Python 4 or when the community has heavily shifted to Python 3. But when there are semantic replacements I think not doing a programmatic deprecation with warnings off by default is a disservice.