Because the auto-unicode of system interfaces is a PITA if you want to deal with opaque data which is either binary or an unknown encoding? Because the incompa

Because the auto-unicode of system interfaces is a PITA if you want to deal with opaque data which is either binary or an unknown encoding? Because the incompatibility of unicode and bytes (b'x' != 'x') and the "everything must be unicode" dogma of the ecosystem make it impossible to use many libraries that previously worked just fine ignoring any non-ascii characters? If nothing else, because it's really really annoying to have to write "b" in front of every string literal just so I'm actually dealing with strings, not text? Unicode-by-default may be dandy for a web developer, but for using python for system applications and glue logic it just makes things difficult. I will never move to python3 for as long as they've broken strings.