[mont_tag]

No, that is not the recommendation. People routinely and reliably inherit from dict.

The UserDict class is mostly defunct and is only still in the standard library because there were a few existing uses that were hard to replace (such as avoiding base class conflicts in multiple inheritance).

[9dev]

Ah, Python. The language where nobody agrees on the right way to do things, ans just does their own instead. Five ways to describe an object of a certain shape? Six package managers, with incompatible but overlapping ways to publish packages, but half of them without a simple way to update dependencies? Asynchronous versions of everything? Metaprogramming that makes Ruby blush? Yes! All of it! Lovely.

[smcin]

UserDict is not formally deprecated but it will be someday, so code that relies on it is not future-proof.