Well they should coexist, as all string formatting syntaxes have over the years. And though I think macros would be nice to have, there's a valid concern raised

Well they should coexist, as all string formatting syntaxes have over the years. And though I think macros would be nice to have, there's a valid concern raised in the discussion: readability. Having macros opens the door to extremely unpythonic code bases, which could be very hard for anyone outside of the primary audience to understand, let alone meaningfully modify or contribute to. And one of the things that keeps me hooked to Python is that if I install a package and it has some issue or doesn't do something I'd like, it's almost trivial for me to find the relevant section in the installed code, edit it and have the desired behavior on next invocation.