Thanks for your report and your ideas for Python :)
Some remarks:

1) New features have to target 3.2;  2.6 is the current stable version (only security and documentation fixes) and 2.7 is to be released really soon (end of the 2.x line);

2) Can you explain why options['thing'] would be more convenient than options.thing?

3) You can get a dict today with vars(options). (By the way, please open two reports for two requests in the futures.)

4) optparse is superseded by argparse, I don’t know if new features will be added to optparse.