On his blog, Ian Bicking responds to the article, Ruby and Python compared. While there is much in the latter that is uninformed as to what Python is capable of, the most important point I got from Ian's post was:

An important rule in the Python community is: we are all consenting adults. That is, it is not the responsibility of the language designer or library author to keep people from doing bad things. It is their responsibility to prevent people doing bad things accidentally. But if you really want to do something bad, who are we to say you are wrong? It's your program. Maybe you even have a good reason.

I think this should be the motto of any module developer: "Keep people from doing bad things accidentally." It's impossible to keep a developer from shooting himself in the foot if he really wants to, so don't try too hard. Your job is to enable users of your code, not restrict them. I've heard many C++ / Java programmers complain that Python isn't object oriented because it doesn't offer private/protected data for classes. In a perfect world all libraries and modules would be perfectly designed and there would be no need to go mucking with the internals of a module you didn't write. Back here in the real world, APIs are often not as well thought out as they should be. In Python (and in Ruby as well I'm guessing) you can muck about with the internals of classes or objects if you have to. It's either that or get the upstream package fixed and distributed everywhere before you can deploy your application.