If this becomes seen as 'my' cause, I suspect it will run out of steam very quickly. I truly hope python-dev, as a community, takes some ownership of this issue
That certainly won't happen. python-dev, as a community, has never ever taken ownership of anything. It's always individuals who take ownership. So you essentially say that you want somebody else (but not you) take ownership - which, of course, is certainly fine. Hence my call for volunteers.
There seem to be a number of people who agree the status-quo isn't acceptable, so I'm not sure what would happen in that case...
My prediction is that it will depend on whether workable code is available by the time a decision is made to migrate. If code is available, then migration will happen (no matter whether the code has an owner); if no code is available, migration will stall. Regards, Martin