> I don't know what's difficult about Unicode in Python 2 either, once you understand the difference between Unicode and UTF-8.

"once you understand the difference between Unicode and UTF-8" is what's difficult about Unicode in Python 2. I understand it, you might understand it, but I have to interop w/ and work w/ code written by people who do not. I'm not fool-proof either, so I greatly appreciate that the language makes a hard distinction now; doing the right thing by default is the point.