I'm not certain that I agree with the argument used to justify keeping this as a 'normal' priority issue. Apparently, since it doesn't effect the entire python community and being as there is no readily available solution, the decision is to treat it as a minor problem. Were one to apply the same logic to, what say, epidemiology, then I suppose the lack of a vaccine for HIV would not be a particularly pressing issue either. 

If priority escalation is out of the question, can we at least have an update? After three years of workarounds, I'm beginning to suspect that the idea is to wait until the effected packages become deprecated and then declare 'solved!'.