Revisiting the idea Nikolaus raised last year regarding whether or not this could be done using a dedicated API in the sys module, I realised today that even if we decided to use a separate public API, *that API* would still need a defined way to modify the stream encoding and error handling in place.
Since we're going to need the object level in-place modification API regardless, a separate sys module API for modifying the standard streams in particular would then introduce additional complexity without providing a proportional benefit.