Maybe not, but as someone in the VFX/CG industry where Python 3 is only just being moved to this year (still on 2.7 mostly) because we didn't really need unicod

Maybe not, but as someone in the VFX/CG industry where Python 3 is only just being moved to this year (still on 2.7 mostly) because we didn't really need unicode, getting rid of the GIL in 3.0 would have very likely made us jump to Python 3 almost instantly years ago. Different people want different things I guess...