UPDATE: Adhering to PEP8 conventions on naming packages using lower-case letters and underscores nicely sidesteps this issue. So, for namespace with a root package of "MyFirstPackage" would have a lib/python/myfirstpackage folder with any .py files that need to accompany the namespace in it.

The loader failing because the package matched the root namespace is probably still a bug of some sort, but now that I know a little better about naming conventions I can see why this might not have been tested.

Hope this saves some of you norms (like me) some time if you run across it.