> But I've seen this sort of crap in all sorts of "standard" lib's in Python, and it never seems to get cleaned-up...

I assume you meant to write "I've seen this sort of crap and written patches for it"?

Every language and library has its warts and Python is no exception. By and large though, I'd say that Python's standard library is the best part of the language. Sure there are a lot of things like this out there, but for the most part, the standard library "just works" the way it's supposed to.