It's true that you need to budget for maintenance. It is a serious societal problem that maintenance is underfunded. But that means that any language revision

It's true that you need to budget for maintenance. It is a serious societal problem that maintenance is underfunded. But that means that any language revision needs to work hard at making the transition easy and incremental. 2to3 was and is laughable; at no point was it a reasonable solution. It's okay to say "we need maintenance money". But no one has an unlimited budget. People complain about the 2->3 transition because (1) it was extraordinarily steep, (2) was not justified, (3) its huge costs are repeatedly denied.