I'm 100% not picking on you but, I started programming in Python around 2004. When Py3k came out, I had exactly zero of these gripes. Not once did I ever say, "I wish urlsplit were in urllib.parse instead of urllib", or anywhere else. I had no problems with iterables, the async stuff (honestly with the GIL, why does any of that matter), exceptions or imports. I recognize that some users of Python did, library/framework devs, etc. But Py3k is a huge, incompatible, and confusing change for 90% of Python devs, and the benefits are things they didn't, and still don't care about. It was honestly just a bad decision.
Given how many people and projects suddenly said "yeah, actually, we want to be on Python 3 now" after seeing the new stuff in 3.4 and 3.5, I think you're overestimating the number of people who don't care about these features.
I take your point, but I have a few counterarguments:
1. Python 3.4 was released 7 years after 3.0. That's a very long time.
2. Assuming you're referring to the async features (none of the other stuff is really momentous), I can understand that for framework devs. It's really not a big deal for most users though, and because of the GIL, it's not as if they'll suddenly reap the benefits of parallelism. All it really means is nicer algorithm expressions and event loops.
3. There's no technical reason the new stuff couldn't have been added to Python 2. The roadblocks are manpower and politics.
4. Even if we stipulate async/await/asyncio are huge, busted Unicode support, 7 years of development, and breaking compatibility with everything is just a terrible tradeoff.
There's just no way this was a good idea, and Python devs could earn a lot of credibility back if they just said "oops". But there's no chance of that.
