> So I guess this brings me back to my original issue. I'm not looking 
> for particularly advanced stripping. I just want to remove all 
> whitespace and other non-printing characters.

.strip only strips whitespace.  Stripping non-printing characters and additional 'whitespace' is something that is too specific for a builtin method, especially because people might disagree on the characters that are considered whitespace and non-printing.

> Thus strip and isspace are now unusable methods in Python for common
> use cases. This seems unfortunate.

I believe they work fine for the common case -- in fact these methods have been around for years and no one complained.
Also Unicode has a number of more or less space-like characters that are not whitespace and whitespace chars that don't look like whitespace.
If one needs to strip a different set of (whitespace) chars, it's always possible to pass it to .strip or to define a new function like
def mystrip(s):
    return s.strip().strip(u'\u200B\ufeff')