[toyg]

Your conspiracy theory is mistaken; if anything instructors profit handsomely by language churn, as people are forced to come back after this or that update.

No, the problem is simple featuritis spurred by adoption. Python has reached a point where the language is basically feature-complete, but adoption keeps growing. That means that more and more programmers arrive to the ecosystem from other fields, and advocate for constructs they are familiar with or that map more closely to their problem domains. This influence is a good thing in some cases, and a bad one in others.

Operators in particular are a minefield. Python is traditionally inclined not to use special operators, which helps readability quite dramatically. There are very few exceptions (basically only @ for decorators, which is outside code flow anyway). This is why people hate new operators so much: we work with Python to stay away from unreadable, write-only code full of special characters. I understand the frustration of rote in some areas, and any professional is free to sharpen his own tools in the way he prefers -- just don't force the ecosystem at large to lower its code quality just so you can check out 10 minutes earlier from your 9-to-5 large-codebase CRUD job.