[eyelidlessness]

I was thinking through my response to this, and realized that I would just be repeating what I already said.

Is there any reason to require extra work to support unicode strings?

[asdfgadsfgasfdg]

I've come into large python2 projects which had been started with non-unicode strings (because the initial developers didn't think about it). At some point a user with non-English characters invariably signs up and then shortly complains. It has been significant work to (1) convert everything that should be converted to unicode (2) re-train the developers to use the unicode syntax.