First, my apologies for sitting on the outstanding patches here. I just got back from a week-long trip and am digging out, so don't think I'm ignoring (any of) you.
Which version of Python 3 should I download to test modified drivers? I am having a terrible time installing pyobject and PyGTK to get the pi repository; multiple failures...
Yeah, you can't install pygtk in python3, which is the whole reason for needing to really make a move. And, yes, pygobject can be a mess for sure which is one reason I don't think it's a suitable replacement. Pretty much any python3 from 3.4 on or so should be fine. In a linux distro that should be pretty easy with distro packages. If it's windows, I'm not sure I can help much as I haven't tried to get a python3 environment working there yet.
However, if you're just trying to do basic testing you could install the wxpython stuff which is a lot simpler and use chirpwx.py instead, which won't require any of the gobject stuff.
--Dan