[rpcope1]

There's at least a handful of places that you can't escape them, one of the most evident in my mind is when constructing higher order functions or other decorators. Maybe a simple example would be a retry higher order function (or decorator), where you can't know the arguments and their form ahead of time, and want to invoke the wrapped function as is (and only do something like repeating if an exception is triggered). Keyword arguments are helpful for writing certain kinds of generic code, but definitely can be easily abused (much like most of the meta-programming facilities in Python).