A lot of these are explicitly here to provide customization points of the initialization to subclasses... I wouldn't overly worry about them unless they are actually problematic (which can definitely happen).

I agree with @anntzer, many of the cases where we have this are using setters (you have the same problem with properties) that cause non-trivial internal state change. We both want to override those things in sub-classes and to set up defaults in __init__ (and to not have the state setting logic in 2x places) so I think we just have to absorb this complexity.

The advise to use composition is well meaning, but I don't think practical for us....

For setters/properties, it would be work to define the subclass attributes before calling the super init.

Would that be a reasonable pattern?

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Let's not follow up on this for now.