To all your questions: Because it takes time. It takes time to add things to the stdlib, especially if the are replacing "an old reliable." In the case of Requ

To all your questions: Because it takes time. It takes time to add things to the stdlib, especially if the are replacing "an old reliable." In the case of Requests, it is just a wrapper on the stdlib. There is nothing in Requests you can't do in the stdlib, ditto pretty much everything. As far as lxml goes, there are a ton of XML parsing/query libraries out there. In lxml's case it is built on libxml2. I believe there is another library that is also build on libxml2, however lxml has better syntax for the most part. Should it be in the standard library? Probably not, it depends on a pretty heavy weight C library and most people don't really need it. When you do, you use it. I have no idea what is going on with the simplejson business. I just use the json lib. I don't see anything wrong with subprocess or the threading libraries. They do what they need to do. I use subprocess quite often, it works fine. It is way better than the actual legacy version (in the os library).