The inherent behaviour of python installations (local or global) is such that it expects to source system wide modules from the global python installation. 

There is no non hacky way to solve this problem.

The idea of local installations is that they should be independent of system-wide builds. Python's behaviour contradicts this condition.

In cases where users on clusters need to maintain their own python installations such that these installations are independent of uncontrollable cluster variables, python will break on a regular basis as it tries to import modules from the system wide sources which were compiled on a similar python version but with different parameters.

Why was this express decision made to include this path in the python development tree? 

How can this be resolved without hacking site.py?