Guido van Rossum openly admits the move from 2 to 3 was a bit of a disaster. I think some of the decisions made since then have been more conservative in a bid

Guido van Rossum openly admits the move from 2 to 3 was a bit of a disaster. I think some of the decisions made since then have been more conservative in a bid to avoid such damage again. And talk of a Python 4 is for the most part academic. It sounds like the package authors sticking with Python 2 that you're dealing with are just stubborn beyond belief. The rest of the world has moved on whether they agreed with the changes in Python 3 or not. Hopefully if the packages are useful enough to others and the licence allows it, people will fork them and make them work with 3.