Hi Fred!
Regarding changing LOAD_CONST 0 to LOAD_NONE, yes. What's more interesting are the changes of LOAD_GLOBAL 'None' to one of LOAD_CONST 0 or LOAD_NONE. That could be changed to use LOAD_CONST 0 *now*, without adding a new bytecode, and we could get a better idea of how much performance it actually buys us in practice, since we get rid of two dict lookups (globals & builtins).
It's clear now.. thanks!
That doesn't address the deprecation cycle, but it would be nice to see what the change would buy us.
I'm going to work on it, and come back with some results.