The more interesting part is the relative directory and how often is it resolved? Can you change a program's imports by inducing it to change its working directory immediately after startup (or before any lazy imports)? If so, we should resolve it to a full path when adding it, regardless of -I.
Having the first entry there is required for local imports to work from the startup script, so I don't see it going anywhere. There have been many discussions about how to deal with the shadowing "problem", but the eventual answer was consenting adults.