Guess what? Freshly debootstrapped Debian doesn't have Python installed at all, too. And guess why? Because all the essential tooling in Debian is compiled. But then there is optional tooling, and Python 3 is yet to be used there.

But we were not talking about what interpreters are in a default installation. We were talking about Python 3 being the default Python.

> And yes, since 6 is still not EOL the fact that they are still on 2.6 by default is something I can hold against them.

No, you cannot. The primary thing RHEL provides is stability.

> Lack of support in logging for logging over TCP.

(1) Not like you cannot add it trivially. (2) It's not a good idea to work in Python's logging with unreliable things like network. You should always isolate Python logging from those things by using spooler. BTDTGTS.

> The lack of dictionary comprehensions (and I guess set comprehensions too, but I don't really use sets too frequently).

Of course, because those are essential part that cannot be trivially emulated by dict() constructor.

From all you said, only I/O performance, context managers, and lack of argparse are somewhat sensible arguments. They sum up to too little for me to consider them a significant difference in how it feels to write code (not to mention that optparse is adequate and I don't see argparse as much of a progress), but then I normally use half a dozen of other languages and runtimes, so I have a different perspective.