Thank you for the suggestion, but we will decline.  We looked at this before and decided not to go down this path, preferring instead to the keep the builtin function simple and focused on its core task of enumeration.

To cover the rarer cases, it is a simple matter to fulfill the need with fast, clear code using itertools:

>>> from itertools import count
>>> names = ['eddard', 'catelyn', 'robb', 'sansa', 'arya', 'bram', 'rickon']
>>> for i, name in zip(count(start=7, step=-1), names):
        print(i, name)

7 eddard
6 catelyn
5 robb
4 sansa
3 arya
2 bram
1 rickon