Amazing writeup, @patrick_mooney – you should publish it as a blog post or something outside of this forum.
You should also definitely publish your IF parser as a Python library/module on Pip when it’s done. There seem to be many people interested in writing IF in Python, but all of them seem to homebrew their own parser system (probably because of all 3 reasons you listed, since @tundish’s Balladeer does exist and people could use that if it fits their needs), adding to the problematic Python IF ecosystem.