I agree 100% (I come from a "use all the cores with threads and shared memory to get linear speedups on many workloads" world). But I think at this point the python leadership has committed to the "every time the GIL-removal looks plausible, find some more single-core speedups to stave off the change". Put another way: I've given up on the hope that python will ever multicore the way I think it should multicore.