OK, this whole time I thought we were talking about a sensible application of text_type to the API, perhaps with some leniency for bytes-ish-ness on python 2.  I haven't reviewed the PR, I was just responding to the concerns as raised on the list.

If it's just randomly encoding on one version and not the other, and correct usage of the API depends on *users* doing 'if PY2:' in their own code, then perhaps Mark's concern is indeed well-founded and we should roll it back before 16.6.

-glyph