First was the idea that normal feature contributors should not see any b"" or any sign of python3 support for the first couple years of the effort. Huge mistake

First was the idea that normal feature contributors should not see any b"" or any sign of python3 support for the first couple years of the effort. Huge mistake. You need some b"". When I read that, I was angry on behalf of the people doing the porting work who had their hands tied by it, and I was angry on behalf of the Mercurial developers who, I think, must have been underestimated. It's normal that platforms don't stand still and coding standards on a project evolve over time. Obviously it's not going to fly for open source contributors to be "voluntold" to do porting work, but to be aware of it and accommodate it and know enough about the new platform to mostly avoid creating new work for the porters seems like a small and reasonable ask, especially when you compare it to the effort required to make high-quality contributions in the first place. I get that there are people who are bitter to this day about Python having a version 3, but surely by 2017 the vast, vast majority of developers who were going to rage quit the Python community over it were already gone.