[me]
Before we waste more time on this, let me explain why I like the rule that all exception classes be derived from Exception. It's only a vague liking, and maybe it's not worth making it a rule. I like it because including Exception (or one of its well-known subclasses) in the base class is a clue to the reader that a particular class declaration is used as an exception. AFAIK this is the only reason why Java has a similar rule; C++ does not, and lets you throw any class.
I can't see any implementation benefits from the requirement. It sounds like you can't either -- or else you would have pointed them out by now. So maybe we shouldn't bother with this rule, and then we should take the recommendation out of the documentation. But I still kind of like it, for the reason I explained in the previous paragraph.
One other, more practical reason to like the rule: "except Exception:" would become equivalent to "except:". The advantage is that you can then write "except Exception, e:" and catch the exception instance in a local variable without having to call sys.exc_info(). --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)