If you don't want to deal with async stuff... then just don't use it. In the last week or two, I started a new personal project in Python, one where I decided from the outset to take full advantage of 3.6, and I don't have a single async, await, import asyncio, or @asyncio.coroutine anywhere in my code. It's not the kind of code I want to write, so I don't write it. Instead, I'm happy with f-strings and the ability to union dicts together [0].

I do agree though that the type annotations hurt the overall austere laconicity of Python code. I don't use them myself, and I'm lucky that I don't have to read through anyone else's code that uses them, so it's not quite a big deal (yet).

f-strings alone have made me not want to go back to any older version.

    [0] {**foo, **bar} # where foo and bar are both dicts; introduced in Python 3.5