Well, in 2008 the PSF had a budget of $500k for the entire world. To compare with JS, this is the order of magnitude of the salary of one single person working

Well, in 2008 the PSF had a budget of $500k for the entire world. To compare with JS, this is the order of magnitude of the salary of one single person working on google chrome. The community didn't have a lot of resources for a long time, and so had to prioritize: it chose to focus on python strenghts, and not compensate for weaknesses. It couldn't do both. Keeping the implementation simple was also a way to keep the project manageable on the cheap (and by cheap in mean in work hours, since the first 15 years, most core devs were just doing it for free). Today, a lot of companies with a lot of money have much to gain to invest in python, and so we can finally have our cake and eat it too.