I never saw the initial versions as viable versions for production work. IIRC, neither did the authors. Part of what I think was so good about the plan was that it was a parallel track for so long. They didn’t start the process of sunsetting v2 until v3 was ready to take on the migration. The specific steps taken, versions released, that wasn’t what was so good IMO. It was the time scale. This was a good decade long transition. The fact that Python thought it would have that much time to make the transition was audacious, but it was going to take that long. And now we have a better language that has supported many more years of growth.