All discussion on PEP's happens in public forums where anyone can opine on things before they are accepted. I agree that the experts are more likely to participate in this exchange. And while this is wish-washy, I feel like the process is really intended to benefit the experts more than the novices anyways.

There have been processes put into place in recent years to try to curb the difficulty of things. One of those is that all new PEPs have to include a "how can you teach this to beginers" section, as seen here on this pep: https://peps.python.org/pep-0750/#how-to-teach-this

I think "how can you teach this to beginners?" is a fantastic, low-hanging fruit option for encouraging the wizards to think about that very important type of user.

Other than a more broad "how is the language as a whole faring?" test, which might be done through surveys or other product-style research, I think this is just plainly a hard problem to approach, just by the nature that it's largely about user experience.

The average Python developer does not even know what a "PEP" is. Open discussion is good yes, but no one really knows what the average developer wants because they simply does not care if its Python or Java or whatever else.

"Some hammers are just shaped weird, oh well, just make do with it."

For example, some people that I interview does not "get" why you have to initialize the dict before doing dict[k] += 1. They know that they have to do some ritual of checking for k in dict and dict[k] = 0. But they don't get that += desugars into dict[k] = dict[k] + 1.