Ahhh i see now. 

Even the simple case "class Foo(bar='baz'): pass" fails.

I misunderstood the documentation then. I thought that python 3 introduced a new interface for all classes when it actually just introduced the option to add keyword arguments to your own metaclasses but didn't alter the base level class interface.

I wanted a bit more background around the object.__init__ and found this ticket: http://bugs.python.org/issue1683368. While this is probably not the only place where this comes up I see the tact that the python core team took and understand your reference more completely now.

I thank both of you for your help and quick responses.