My vision of a "perfect world" on this front would be Python bindings to a
formalized, supported, and documented "Ethereal API Library".
We have an "Ethereal API Library", but it's not yet formalized - there
will probably be further changes to the API before that happens, and
it's not going to happen in the near term.
There's also a library for reading and writing packets, which is a
separate library (there are programs that use it but don't do packet
dissection); its API will probably have further changes before it's
formalized.