Thanks, Steve, for writing this up:
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8013/
A couple of comments:
I like the council model, but don't understand why the core developers should be stripped from any decision powers.
External people will not have the institutional knowledge core developers have, know why past decisions were reached and thus cannot use this knowledge to base the new decisions on.
To give you an example:
As much as I admire people such as Larry Wall for designing popular programming languages, I would not want to see Python take a Perl'ish approach to language design.
Additionally, we'd have to transfer knowledge of how work is done on the council for every new member. I've seen how long this takes on the PSF and EPS boards. It effectively causes the council to not be fully operable for a couple of months at least.
This will not happen with core developers as council members.
Could you give a reason why the council members should be external ?
Another point I don't understand is why we should drop the BDFL- Delegate system. This has proven to work well.
Perhaps PEP 8011 is a better approach, but it's not available yet, so I'm focusing on your PEP for now.