Python 3.0 was *declared* to be an experimental release, and by most standards 3.1 (in terms of the core language and functionality) was a solid release.
Any reasonable expectation about Python 3 adoption predicted that it would take years, and would include going through a phase of difficulty and disappointment...
Declaring something to be a turd doesn't change the fact that it's a turd. I have a feeling that most people outside this list would have much rather avoided the difficulty and disappointment altogether. Let's be honest here; 3.X was released to the community in part as an extended beta. That's not a problem, unless you drop the word "beta". And if you're still not buying that, imagine the sort of response you'd get if you tried to sell software that billed itself as "experimental", and promised a phase of "disappointment". Why would you expect the Python world to react any differently?
Whilst I agree that there are plenty of issues to workon, and I don't underestimate the difficulty of some of them, I think "half-baked" is very much overblown. Whilst you have a lot to say about how much of a problem this is I don't understand what you are suggesting be *done*?
I agree that 3.X isn't all bad, and I very much hope it succeeds. And no, I have no answers; I'm just reporting the perception from downwind. So here it is: The prevailing view is that 3.X developers hoisted things on users that they did not fully work through themselves. Unicode is prime among these: for all the talk here about how 2.X was broken in this regard, the implications of the 3.X string solution remain to be fully resolved in the 3.X standard library to this day. What is a common Python user to make of that? --Mark Lutz (http://learning-python.com, http://rmi.net/~lutz)