I think it's instructional to consider what happened to Microsoft with Windows 8 here. They offered a product that users were utterly ambivalent about, and took

I think it's instructional to consider what happened to Microsoft with Windows 8 here. They offered a product that users were utterly ambivalent about, and took a hardline "no debate, that's just how we're doing it" stance. And it totally flopped. So they offered some concessions in Windows 8.1, but by that point the narrative on Windows 8 had already formed and the brand was tarnished. So what was the fix? Windows 10. Arguably 10 isn't actually that different from 8 (I mean yeah, it's better, but if you installed a start menu in 8 it's really not that different). I think Windows 10 worked because by being a new windows, it got to form a new narrative separate from windows 8. The way I see it, Python 3.4+ is a lot like Windows 8.1. It's actually really not bad, but the narrative around its predecessors will never let it truly succeed. The realistic way for python to move forward is to offer a brand new version (5 or 4, doesn't really matter), give some concessions to the python 2 people that will make them feel heard and feel reinvested (bring back the print statement, give us some long wanted things like not-stupid lambdas), and guarantee python 3 compatibility so they're not forking the damn project again. I think at this point so many people have said bad things about Python 3 that the brand is toxic. A new version number might not really mean much technically, but symbolically as a sign to the python community that the devs have finally stopped being stubborn and arrogant and acknowledged they fucked up, it would be huge.