Recently, Cython released the 3.0 version with a Pure Python mode, and I think it would be a game changer in this library, as most of the code is just Python logic using basic types.
Having all the parsing and validation logic running at C speed would be awesome.
The only downside is the library would need to drop support for Python 2, but: is this really a piece of bad news?
I could help with the optimization.