Roundtrippable reprs are certainly part of Python canon, whether or not they are universally used (Chris), or guaranteed (Mike).
I could see __short_repr__ (and associated reprlib) being the desired behavior in some console environments, but I'm not one to say it should be the default in the main Python REPL.
My use cases are for 1) a web based console/REPL and 2) a configuration store that maintains a human readable history of past values (i.e., it does not maintain references to the objects themselves).
But mostly I wanted to kick off the discussion of how to update reprlib (and pprint) to be more efficient and applicable.