Message 169781 - Python tracker

> Can that possibly be right??

Yes. That's the version of ncurses that Apple ships with current versions of OS X. You can build it yourself and install into /usr/local and rebuild python.  For ncurses 5.9, something like:

./configure  --enable-widec --enable-shared --with-shared --without-normal
&& make && sudo make install

should work.  FWIW, when I run your test script with tip, I now do see the two horizontal bars.