This is why Python 2 isn't optional yet:

http://py3readiness.org/

Of the top 360 libraries, only 332 of them support Python 3 (but almost all of them still support Python 2).

This analysis was done in March and expected even support for Python 3 and 2 around now:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/pythonengineering/2016/03/0...

So maybe next year it will be optional, but not yet.

This isn't the thread for that debate, so I'll refrain from a specific response, other than to note that python2 has clearly not been replaced by python3, whatever the language's maintainers wish had happened.

You phrase that as if the language maintainers are the antagonist here. At that point, why continue using a language if you don't agree with the direction the language maintainers believe to be the language's present state? Why would you expect hosting companies (such as Amazon in this example) to necessarily pay support costs to continue hosting a deprecated version of a language side by side with the current version?

So yes, it seems to me that from the standpoint of a hosting company like Amazon for example, Python 2 should be the option for them to host, should not be guaranteed, and maybe even shouldn't cost the same as Python 3 moving forward. That's the present of the language. You are asking them to support the past of the language. Perhaps you should be willing to pay for them to support the past of the language.

(Of course, this particular example is moot because it sounds like Amazon themselves have engineers in the "Python 2 or Die" clade, but it's the example at hand.)

As much as I'd like everybody to be using Python 3, the truth is there's not a lot of immediate benefits, which is why 85% of Python users are still using 2.x.

As a Python user myself, the better, more reliable Unicode-by-default string handling in Python 3 is more than enough of an immediate benefit that I've stopped installing Python 2.x on my devices entirely at this point. Obviously, ymmv, but there seem to me to be a lot of immediate benefits to Python users and what feet dragging remains to stay in 2.x seems more like a political protest of some sort than one focused on actual benefits.