I should probably not submit a patch in the *middle* of a conversation, huh? I thought it was at the point where people were just debating things like.. policy... and.. stuff. And not at a point where someone would come up a whole new idea that ties directly in.

Someone did! Nick Coghlan came up with a better way to spell the whole issue, and a logical companion feature; so I just implemented the patch that way. splitext(path, ignore_leading_dot=False, all_ext=False)

Also added a bunch to the test just to be anal about being sure that no combination of options would screw up the 'default' behavior.
File Added: splitext-leading_dot+all_ext.patch