Electrum 2.0: non-BIP39/32 standardisation complicates matters immensely. Why? Electrum 2.0 has been causing me some frustration, insofar as it seems to be a non-standard implementation of BIP32/BIP39 (HD wallets, mnemonic seed, respectively). The wallet in question is a 2of2 multisig wallet (all P2SH), with the 2nd extended public key being created in pybitcointools using 

bip32_privtopub( bip32_master_key( sha256("a password") ) ), 

then imported into Electrum.

Given the 13 word seed, which itself is non standard since the last word is a checksum, it's proven impossible to export the xpriv key from Electrum. 

How is a mnemonic seed converted to a BIP32 standard extended private key (given the client itself won't allow it)? : EDIT1: with great difficulty, see my answer below

(REFOCUSED) QUESTION: *why does Electrum:


stray from BIP0039?
make exporting the master BIP32 private key impossible?
return partially signed P2SH hex Txs which are malformed?
Thomas Voegtlin , the developer of Electrum explains the reasoning in the first 10 minutes of this interview. I think he also posted same thing to Bitcoin dev mailing list some time ago.

https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/epicenter-bitcoin-69-thomas-voegtlin-electrum-spv-wallets-and-bitcoin-aliases

His main point against BIP39 is that it doesn't include a version number, and the requirement of the word list dictionary in order to implement it.