IMO supporting building Python 2 without Unicode support should be discussed on the python-dev mailing list, it's not an innocent change.

Python is moving strongly to Unicode: Python 3 uses Unicode by default. So to me it sounds really weird to work on building Python 2 without Unicode support. It means that you may have "Python 2" and "Python 2 without Unicode" which are not exactly the same language. IMO u"unicode" is part of the Python 2 language.

--disable-unicode is an old option added while Python 1.5 was very slowly moving to Unicode.

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I have the same opinion on --without-thread option (we should stop supporting it, this option is useless). I worked in the embedded world, Python used for the UI of a TV set top box. Even if the hardware was slow and old, Python was compiled with threads and Unicode. Unicode was mandatory to handle correctly letters with diacritics.