Serhly, I admire you for all of the obvious effort you put into this but I can't help but think it is misplaced effort.  My original comment was made before you submitted all of the other patches.  As it stands, to proceed with this, there are now tens of thousands of lines of patches to be reviewed.  It will take a lot of effort on a lot of people's part to properly review them.  And even then, no matter how careful you were, there will be new bugs introduced by these patches.  If it takes that much change to properly support --disable-unicode, then it's clearly been a broken feature and fixing it now is on the scale of a large new feature for 2.7.  That just doesn't seem to me like a good choice based on the need for core developers' time and the added risk for the overwhelming majority of Python 2.7 users, who use Unicode-enabled builds.  I think we need to have a discussion on python-dev and a ruling by Benjamin.