[jstimpfle]

You can always opt for explicit dict passing. You are right that it's more typing work (and one can get it wrong...), but the resulting complexity is constant in the sense that it is obvious upfront, never growing, not dependent on other factors like number of dependencies etc.

When opting for explicit, complexity is not hidden and functions are not needlessly coupled to actual data. Personally I'm much more productive this way. Also because it makes me think through properly so I usually end up not needing a dict at all.

Regarding namespacing, python modules act as namespaces already. Also manual namespacing (namespacename+underscore) is not that bad, and technically avoids an indirection. I'm really a C programmer, and there I have to prefix manually and that's not a problem.