It's important to note that one of our key goals in PyPA is to get to
a point where the API of a developer's publishing toolchain of choice
only depends on the *version of the publishing tools* they're using,
and not on the specific version of Python (as long as they're using a
supported version). Encouraging the expansion and increased use of the
distutils API runs counter to that goal in most cases (since it
encourages writing publication and distribution code that will only
work with newer versions of Python), but may sometimes make sense if
it's info that really is CPython centric, or if it's a feature
primarily aimed at tightly controlled environments that can
aggressively drop support for older versions.