The background here is the change in http://bugs.python.org/issue17636 that allows IMPORT_FROM to fall back to sys.modules when written as "from a.b import c as m", while the plain LOAD_ATTR generated for "import a.b.c as m" fails.

One potential resolution to the discrepancy that occurred to me in the python-ideas discussion was to add a new IMPORT_ATTR opcode specifically for use in the latter case.

The main downside I can see is the usual one with adding any new opcode for a niche use case like this one: it risks slowing the eval loop down in general for a marginal improvement in language consistency.

However, I don't think we should reject the possibility out of hand on that basis.