What's stopping people from forking the language at python 2.7? Let the pythonistas add whatever feature they feel like while people who need stability use "Fortran python" or whatever.
Though I'm surprised nobody really wrote a transitional fork (six gets you a lot of the way but "Python 2.8 which has _just_ the str/bytes change" would have been useful).
Ultimately Python 2 isn't a better language, it's just the language everyone's code was in...
If you don't want to change/add something to the language, then why fork it?. You can just continue using it as it is!
Trivializing that by suggesting it was some offhand, unneeded solution to a problem that some dreamy “language designer” thought up is at best completely and utterly ignorant.
Also maintenance, in all forms, is work. That does involve updating your systems from time to time.
Sure, if you don’t program and just write ad-hoc (unmaintainable?) scripts then the transition is annoying. But it’s also not required. Don’t re-write your scripts, you can always ensure that Python 2 is present.
But if you’re maintaining a project that uses the wider ecosystem, then you are at the mercy of that ecosystem. And, at the time of the decision to make Python 3, that ecosystem was saying “Python 2 has a lot of horrible legacy decisions that make it harder than it should be to write good code”.
I have not seen a clear win in real benchmarks. 3 was slower for the longest time, and nowadays it seems head to head depending on the project.
https://speed.python.org/comparison/?exe=12%2BL%2B3.6%2C12%2...
https://speed.python.org/comparison/?exe=12%2BL%2B3.6%2C12%2...