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Structures (aka C Structs) can contain arbitrarily large or
small numbers of basic types inside them.  As such, 'single long
values' are still a valid use.  I use struct for packing and
unpacking of single items (8,4,2 byte integers, 1 byte
integers are faster served via chr and ord) when necessary
(because it is the most convenient), as well as a current
contract where it is not uncommon to be packing and
unpacking 256 byte structs.

Those large structs contains various 1,2,4 and 8 byte
integers, as well as a handful of 16 and 20 byte integers
(which I must manually shift and mask during packing and
unpacking).  I'm a big boy, and can do it, but that doesn't
mean that such functionality should be left out of Python.

As for 'document the approach of going through hex inside
the documentation of the struct module', I am curious about
whether other modules do the same thing, that is to tell
users "this functionality conceptually fits here X%, which
is why it is documented here, but because it does not fit
100%, here is how you can do the same thing, which will
likely look like a strange hack, require slicing potentially
large strings, and be significantly slower than if we had
just added the functionality, but here you go anyways."

Now, I don't /need/ the feature, but I believe myself and
others would find it useful.  I also don't /require/ it be
in struct, but no other modules offer equivalent
functionality; Pickle and Marshal are Python-only, binascii
(and bin2hex) are for converting between binary and ascii
representations for transferring over non-8-bit channels
(email, web, etc.), and no other module even comes close to
offering a similar bit of "packs various types into a binary
format, the same way C would" as struct.

If anyone has a better place for it, I'm all ears (or eyes).