For a Python script parsing command-line arguments, it seems there's only a few candidates:

"optparse" in the standard library, which is quite limited, and besides which was removed in Python 3
"argparse" in the standard library, which is pretty flexible, but which produces weird, un-intuitive "--help" output if you have subcommands.
"docopt", which generates a parser from "--help" output, but traditional "--help" output glosses over a lot of details that I want to specify, like which options are valid with which commands.
"click", which seems to support all the features I need and produce the pretty output I want, but it's a framework that takes over your program rather than a library you call into, and I find that kind of API endlessly frustrating.

This makes me a sad panda.