alt Hacker NewsIt would absolutely have been harder. But the pain of going that path might potentially have been less than the pain of the Python 2 to Python 3 transition. Or, possibly, it wouldn't have been; I'm not claiming the tradeoff is obvious even in hindsight here.
I think you have causation reversed: it would have been at least two orders of magnitude greater to act like moving to python 3 was harder than staying. But you do you boo :emoji-kissey-face: