> it doesn't feel more correct to the programmer. I agree with the details of what you said, but the insidious thing about how Python 2 organized strings and e

> it doesn't feel more correct to the programmer. I agree with the details of what you said, but the insidious thing about how Python 2 organized strings and encodings is that most programmers were free to ignore it and produce buggy software. Then, later, people who had to use that software on non-ascii data would try to use it and it would blow up. This would lead to a very painful cycle of shaking out bugs that the original author may not even be motivated to fix. The decision to force encodings to be explicit and strings/bytes to be separate was a great design change. It literally made all our code more valuable by removing hidden bugs from it.