`doctest` is intended to be anal - there are few things more pointlessly confusing for a user than to see docs that don't match what they actually see when they run the doc's examples.  "Is it a bug?  Did I do it wrong?  Why can't they document what it actually does?! ..."

Things like +ELLIPSIS are intended for cases where the output is _known_ to vary across platforms or runs in ways that can't otherwise be easily hidden (like output that embeds the `id()` of an object), or where only a relatively tiny bit of enormous output is actually interesting.

When someone wants unittest's `assertEqual()`, they should use unittest ;-)  

Although that functionality is already easily handled; for example, here's the OP's first example rewritten to be independent of the dict's representation ordering:

>>> dict_fun() == {'foo': 1, 'bar': 2}
True

Now it's testing what you want to test:  that the results of the expressions on both sides of `==` compare equal.  And this is, to me, clearer on the face of it than introducing a new flag.