Very good points. I suggested the RFC because it usually forces you to think about those very things. What is the protocol? What do you need to make it work? How do you setup a call? How do you tear one down? What bits are in the payloads? Which side has which responsibility? What happens when there is an error? What sort of errors should I expect as a client/server? What if the other side is a different endianness?

Starting in python is not a bad one to do. I think it is a great prototype language. Your suggestion of going to something simpler like C is not a bad idea. It would shake out those dependencies they did not know they had. Python is sneaky about that, as it has some very nice tools just to manage its own data (looking at you dictionaries). But those same tools do not exist in C without some external lib or extra code.