Eric: Actually I posted my comments after reading only Nick’s message, not yours, so no worry :)

Nick:
> the "just do the right thing" aspect is covered by PEP 395.
This is great.  Thanks for clarifying.

> This is an orthogonal proposal that allows power users the ability to override the
> automatic initialisation to handle those cases where it goes wrong.
If I’m understanding correctly, #12934 is one of those issues.  I agree that an option would be better than nothing, but 1) it would not help with older Pythons 2) it would not help naïve users 3) it would complicate the command-line interface of Python.  (Not saying I’m against the idea, just listing cons.)