[burntsushi]

I don't need to be told that proper handling of Unicode is important. I know it's important.

I also don't need to be told that defaults are important. I know they're important.

But it is still a minor improvement under the scope of a ~6 year migration that has been absolute hell to everyone involved. Under any other circumstance, I'd be right there with you saying It's A Really Good Thing, but if we have to pay this high of a cost for it, then the improvement here looks pretty meh to me.

If you want to insist on evaluating this on some absolute scale irrespective of its cost, then I don't want anything to do with that.

Finally, one might argue that whether this is actually minor or not is irrelevant. What's relevant is that a boatload of people perceive the delta between Python 2 and Python 3 to be incredibly small, and yet, the amount of work to migrate is dauntingly large. There's a discrepancy there regardless of whether you disagree with others' valuations of the improvements in Python 3.