Context-sensitive delimiter

[Gribouillis]

Here is a way, using re.sub

from itertools import pairwise
import re

def our_split(data):
    level = 0
    position = [-1]

    def _sub(match):
        nonlocal level
        c = match.group(0)
        level += {'[': 1, ']': -1}.get(c, 0)
        if c == ',' and not level:
            position.append(match.start())

    re.sub(r'[\[\],]', _sub, data)
    position.append(len(data))
    return [data[u+1:v] for u, v in pairwise(position)]

if __name__ == '__main__':
    data = "Richtung route, trend, way [route, direction], tendency [political etc.], course [direction], direction [course, route]"

    result = our_split(data)
    print(result)

Output:
['Richtung route', ' trend', ' way [route, direction]', ' tendency [political etc.]', ' course [direction]', ' direction [course, route]']