I could buy this for those limited use cases (although since more and more we're productionizing scipy code, it would be nice to have sane, maintainable APIs as

I could buy this for those limited use cases (although since more and more we're productionizing scipy code, it would be nice to have sane, maintainable APIs as well as rapid-iterating APIs, but I digress...), but the fact that these are so common across the ecosystem is the more troubling bit (and I think we agree here). :)