Stephen J. Turnbull, ok, I was wong about community expectation, I thougth functools would be more popular with new symbols.

Personnally, I made a wide use of functionnal paradigm but except when I need an heavy use of partial and reduce, the simple fact of importing functools and use the "partial" function has a higher cost than making it differently. 
That's also because python syntax is really convenient and lambda, decorators, iterators... allow a lot of things.