I disagree... you could always leverage six and/or do conditional imports based on sys.version
> And some people were just okay with the unclear semantics of py2 with regards to bytes-unicode.
Usually after searching for answers for quite a while on Stack Overflow...
Sure it was possible, but what benefit would doing all that work get you? More memory use! It wasn't until Python 3.5 that Python 3 was clearly better for most use cases. Even today the regression import performance is problematic for CLI tools.
The point is that the whole py2-3 change was not incremental enough. (We started an ecommerce project right around 3.4, and many, many libs were in shambles, no official py3 support, just random forks on GitHub. The whole Python ecosystem was in a rather sad state. No mypy, no pipenv/poetry/dephell.)
All the gashing of teeth spent on the useless flamewars about py2/py3 could have been spent on other things.
> Usually after searching for answers for quite a while on Stack Overflow...
I was explicitly thinking of Armin Ronacher a prolific library author. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13145172 )
Yes, 3.4 was still not smooth but also not a disaster. I still don't use pipenv, mypy, poetry or dephell and life is fine...