[abecedarius]

The need actually comes up a lot to transpose a list of lists. That zip can do it is not hard to visualize and it's an idiom worth learning. If it still seems unclear, you can name things to help:

    columns = zip(*rows)

or

    def transpose(list_of_lists): return zip(*list_of_lists)

But anyway, yeah, tastes differ, it's fine if we disagree. I do agree that Python has gotten uncomfortably complex. But this is a very old feature from simpler times and does not add any syntax or metaprogramming features, it's just an already needed function.