Currently, __repr__ and __str__ representation of bytes is the same. Perhaps it is worth making them different, this will make it easier to visually perceive them as a container of integers from 0 to 255,
instead of a mixture of printable and non-printable ascii characters. It is proposed:

a) __str__ - leave unchanged
b) __repr__ - represent as sequence of escaped hex

>>> a = bytes([42,43,44,45,46])
>>> a    # Current
b'*+-./'
>>> a    # Proposed
b'\x2a\x2b\x2d\x2e\x2f'