but the alternative of dealing with unattractive warts in a language until eternity is also not very attractive.
The problem is that the only significant wart that got fixed was Unicode. We still have the GIL, a very slow runtime, convoluted packaging, barely-usable lambdas, and limited typing. That's a pretty lousy payoff for 10 years and probably millions of engineer-hours.
The people who work on CPython were not trying to "fix" any of the things you listed in Python 3. They seem happy with the GIL and the tradeoffs they've made in the runtime. Guido has never liked lambdas and their poor state in Python is not an accident.
Python might be making bad calls, but it's hard to criticized a process for failing to accomplish things it wasn't trying to accomplish.
The problem is that the only significant wart that got fixed was Unicode. We still have the GIL, a very slow runtime, convoluted packaging, barely-usable lambdas, and limited typing. That's a pretty lousy payoff for 10 years and probably millions of engineer-hours.