Lua does it very frequently, and people generally don't get quite as upset about it. The popular LuaJIT compiler and interpreter even implements a language that is somewhere between Lua 5.1 or Lua 5.2 without matching either exactly.
I don't think that developers hated Python 3. They hated to having to rewrite/fix a ton of 3. party modules. For a long time the improvements in Python 3 simply wasn't worth the hassle of dealing with incompatibilities.
Sucks that some people are still stuck with 2.7 but it's definitely worth upgrading if you can.