Reviewing the issue, I think there's still an open question regarding the way distutils handles generated script execution that may impact setuptools as, so adding Jason to the nosy list.

For the "don't set sys.path[0] by default" aspect, we would need a different executable that uses more paranoid defaults, which would be contingent on the PEP 432 startup refactoring landing for 3.7 (as too much behaviour is currently embedded inside Py_Main for alternate defaults to be reasonably maintained).