Why? The most annoying thing that I remember about it was popular modules that hadn't been ported yet. In essence, a temporary problem; growing pains.

The Unicode/string/bytes changes were welcome (to me). But that might just be because I had actually encountered situations where I had to deal with seemingly endless complexity and ambiguity related to Unicode stuff and encodings. Python 3 made everything much more logical 🤷

yep, that's how major version changes do be working. if they didn't decide to implement breaking changes to improve the language people would have been complaining about how terrible python2 is to use