I believe it's a lot easier to state this long after the migration took place. Removing the GIL, or any host of other changes, could have split the community to

I believe it's a lot easier to state this long after the migration took place. Removing the GIL, or any host of other changes, could have split the community to a place where the language would have been abandoned except amongst a small minority. At this point, removing the GIL is such a large change, it would probably be better to wait for the end of (practical) performance to single-threaded code, and then remove the GIL. At that point you would have a community consensus behind the change, and the holdouts wouldn't have a stranglehold on keeping the community from moving forward. I'm not sure if I would call the move from 2 -> 3 a trivial change, but maybe you're more well versed in Python than I am (and I'm fully willing to admit that may be the case).