And I thought that if working with Python 2 on a MS Windows system, then you also didn't really have to think about strings. That is, Python's narrow Unicode strings matched the native UCS-2 of Windows.

I did some Python 2 programming under Windows and don't recall string issues; certainly fewer issues than I've had in dealing with Python 3 changes.

I agree that what we have now is an improvement. I just don't see why the old way was really Unix-centric.