Most people didn't learn to work around unicode issues during the 2.7 time frame. Many third party modules tended to explode spectacularly with encode/decode e

Most people didn't learn to work around unicode issues during the 2.7 time frame. Many third party modules tended to explode spectacularly with encode/decode errors, when they were fed non-ascii strings, when used by people who write using all these funny characters. Just the correct handling of strings in Python 3 alone is a hell of a reason to switch to it.