I have to stress that I used 2to3 to tackle the vast majority of conversion issues. It was on a small codebase and, but still, it worked rather well. While I feel the transition has not gone terribly smoothly, I truly believe Python 3 is a better language - and as I noted in a different thread [0] - the unicode support alone is worth it (for me). While not significantly beneficial in the vast majority of computational sciences, it is helpful in some areas - linguistics to give an example.
So, there's no benefit to Python 3, but we should all migrate to it anyways? You think Python 2.7 will die, but trust me as soon as the PSF abandons it, someone will swoop in and become the new defacto supporter. For many of us, stability is a feature, and the fact that 2.7 won't change in gratuitous ways is super attractive.
Nothing is going to be EOLed. Its going to be business as usual and the python foundation will never agree to killing python 2 in the next decade.
the only way forward is through six ( https://pypi.python.org/pypi/six) or something like it. Its well worth building and funding a python 2 compatibility layer in python3... and then moving to py3 runtime.
im actually surprised that someone like Google is not throwing some funding towards building a compatibility layer.
Sir/Madam, I am here to make you happy then. Python 3's multiprocessing library is leaps and bounds "better" than python 2's. By "better", I mean faster(in my workloads) by 30-40%. If time is money, then that feature alone saves you both.
They're faster than pure python in the general case, but once you throw numpy, numba, numexpr and cython into the mix and focus on numeric workloads, most of that difference disappears.