Believe it or not, yes. Ultimately, edi-dev will sell a SEF for $60 US if you can show proof of license from X12 (I had a conversation with them after my original post). The internal license we are going to need from X12 will get us access to the XSD for the messages, which should me usable as a means to get the schema into IRIS (so I'm told).

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.