At the moment I estimate a 50% chance that etch will ship with a debhelper that I don't loathe. The NMUed up version for the python transition is not something I'll be at all happy with etch shipping with. Thanks to several Debian pythoneers, we have a plan to fix this, but getting it into testing in time for the freeze is looking increasingly tricky. The plan is:

1. Revert dh_python to the pre-NMU version.
2. Make dh_python detect debian/pycompat or Python-Version and become a no-op in those cases. Generally deprecate dh_python.
3. Make dh_pysupport do everything dh_python used to do.
4. Make dh_pycentral do everything dh_python used to do.
5. Test everything. (Ideally, all python packages.)

Steps 1 2 and 3 are done in the 3-day delayed upload queue. Step 4 still needs to be done, and some initial tries at it have failed. Step 5 has so far been limited to building a half-dozen or so packages.

The details are in #381389.