I am not sure why the length of time matters. They were spending the time doing other important things. They were making the rational decision to work on somet

I am not sure why the length of time matters. They were spending the time doing other important things. They were making the rational decision to work on something that was important and WASN'T already working. The python 2 code was working fine, it didn't have bugs and it didn't need any new features. Other code either didn't exist and needed to be written or had bugs that needed to be fixed. It makes sense that changing working code never made it high enough on the priority list to get worked on.