@rhettinger:

"Deprecating [...] just cause disruption to existing, deployed code"

How? Deprecating is used just to maintain intact the already existing code...

"Please do not go down of the path of making yourself the arbiter of what is Pythonic or standard.  The other core devs in this conversation are highly experienced.  Insulting them or the Fredrik Lundh's existing API won't help matters"

I'm not insulting anyone, I just said *IMHO* it's not pythonic. 

I think the example of a tree created with a simple dictionary is a clear signal that Python, in the Guido's mind, was created with the intention that equality should check the content of the objects and not just the ids, as Java, for example, does, even for objects that must be traversed to see if they are equal to another one.

The fact you can check if two objects are equal using simply == is, _IMHO_, more elegant, simple and useful. The fact that == checks the ids is not useful at all, since I can do it with id(elem1) == id(elem2). So what's the purpose of == ?