I had closed this issue because I thought issue 23864 would be resolved by extending the existing behavior. Three years later, still with no resolution, Guido commented on that issue that the current behavior shouldn't be extended and only the documentation should be fixed. In apparent contradiction, we now have the Collection ABC (Sized, Iterable, Container), which does implement a __subclasshook__.

    >>> issubclass(array.array, abc.Collection)
    True

Anyway, it was obviously a mistake to close this specific issue in favor of the general design problem. This problem can be easily solved via registration. The general design problem is dead in the water.