Further, the changes were made for very good reasons, such as allowing beginners to accept user input on day 1 without opening ACE exploits in their programs, and having plain double-quoted string literals actually produce a string rather than an immutable byte buffer that vaguely assumes a generic code-page encoding, except for the contexts where it will complain if it's not plain ASCII (admittedly, this is still an improvement over trying to handle text in C with only the standard library), and making sure that decoding operations don't produce encoding errors and vice-versa, and making `isinstance(1<<64, int)` give the expected `True` result, and making `except` syntax make sense, and making sure there aren't two fundamentally different kinds of user-defined class.
And by making these changes, we actually got Python 3 in about 2.5 years (4.5 if you allow for the first couple of releases having some issues figuring out the string literal transition and other such details — I agree they were premature) and were able to offer another 11 (9) for everyone to migrate. Whereas with Raku the entire 13.5 (more like 15.5) year period was spent on design and implementation, and now there hasn't been a new stable release for almost 5 years.