One final thought on that idea.  Part of the reason why I didn't go back to the drawing board and re-think the API was because I thought folks were pushing back on the idea of *default* behavior possibly raising exceptions.

If I misread it, and the pushback was "we want real Python values when we can get them, and strings when we can't, and it's acceptable if we have to explicitly request that behavior from inspect.signature() and inspect.get_annotations()", then hot diggity!, maybe we've finally found a compromise we can all agree on.