2) a bunch of people answering "what is a wart" is not a way to get the Python community to agree on what needs to be changed in the language.  People with ideas need to write them up thoughtfully with proposals for improvements, and then engage meaningfully in the discussion that follows.

You seem to think that people just need to identify "warts" and then we can start changing the language to remove them.  What you consider a "wart" is probably the result of a complex balance of competing forces.  Changing Python is hard.  We take backward compatibility very seriously, and that sometimes makes it hard to "remove warts."

You've nailed it. The goal of listing warts on SO is not to prove that some language suxx [1], but to provide answers to question about *why* some particular wart exists. "wart" may not be the best word, because from the other side of rebalancing things there is most likely some "feature", but when people experience problems, they usually face only one side of the story [2]

As I already said it is impossible to fully master the language without a complete coverage of such things. These things are equally interesting for users and for future contributors. There are the starting points in making the next better generation dynamic language (if the one is possible).

SO is a FAQ site, not a web-page or a wiki, so I expect there to be answers with research on the history of design decisions behind the balancing of the language, the sources of "warts" and things that are balancing them on the other side. I expect there to find analysis what features will have to be removed in order for some specific "wart" to be gone, and I see it as a perfect entrypoint for learning high-level things about programming languages.