"Guido van Rossum"
(Context: There's a large crowd with pitchforks and other sharp pointy farm implements just outside the door of my office at Google. They are making an unbelievable racket. It appears they are Google engineers who have been bitten by a misfeature of Python, and they won't let me go home before I have posted this message.)
One particular egregious problem is that *subpackage* are subject to the same rule. It so happens that there is essentially only one top-level package in the Google code base, and it already has an __init__.py file. But developers create new subpackages at a frightening rate, and forgetting to do "touch __init__.py" has caused many hours of lost work, not to mention injuries due to heads banging against walls.
It seems to me that the right way to fix this is to simply make a small change to the error message. On a failed import, have the code check if there is a directory that would have been the requested package if it had contained an __init__ module. If there is then append a message like "You might be missing an __init__.py file". It might also be good to check that the directory actually contained python modules.