I understand you ask 'why not monkey-patch locale.getlocale ?
That will be a maintenance nightmare.

Time sinked to that could be better invested pushing the issue to python bugtracker (but locale things are slow there, and in particular the 'no round trip setlocale -> getlocale -> setlocale' was closed with 'works for me'.
Still, I see the issue in win xp and 7, py 2.6, 2.7, 3.3 )'