> Actually that's the behavior of python 2, it works fine, until you send invalid characters then it blows up.
Not that I've seen.
Example of where Python 3 has rained shit on my parade: I wrote a program that backs up files for Linux. It works fine in python 2, but in python 3 you rapidly learn you must treat filenames as bytes otherwise your backup program blows up on valid Linux filenames. It's not just decoding errors, it's worse. Because Unicode doesn't have a unique encoding for each string, so the round trip (binary -> string -> binary) is not guaranteed to get you the same binary. If you make the mistake of using that route (which Python3 does by default) then one day Python3 will tell you can't open a file you os.listdir() microseconds ago and can clearly see is still there.
Later, you get some sort of error when handling one of those filenames, so you sys.stderr.write('%s: this file has an error' % (filename,)). That worked in python2 just fine, but in python3 generates crappy looking error messages even for good filenames. You can't try to decode the filename to a string because it might generate a coding error.
This works: sys.write('b%b: this file has an error' % (filename,)), but then you find you've inserted other strings into error messages and soon the only "sane" thing to do is to to convert every string in your program to bytes. Other solutions like sys.write('%s: this file has an error' % (filename.decode(errors='ignore'),)) but corrupt the filename the user sees, are verbose, and worst of all if you forget it isn't caught by unit tests but still will cause your program to blow up in rare instances.
I realise that for people who live in a land of clearly delineated text and binary, such as the django user posting here, these issues never arise and the clear delineation between text and bytes is a bonus. But people who use python2 as a better bash scripting language than bash don't live in that world. For them python2 was a better scripting language than bash, but is being being depreciated in favour of python3 that's actually more fragile than bash for their use case. (That's a pretty impressive "accomplishment".) Perhaps they will go to back to Perl or something, because it stands Python3 isn't a good replacement.