Honestly the problem was they did not go far enough. They hoped to have a minimal churn switch to avoid getting locked into bikeshedding for the rest of time. However, there was so little user user facing improvements that the required change hardly seemed worth porting. They also failed to initially offer any automatic porting tooling which could have increased adoption.

I will be forever mad that they did not use that as a breaking opportunity to namespace the standard library. Something like: `import std.io` so that other libraries can never conflict.

> They also failed to initially offer any automatic porting tooling which could have increased adoption.

Maybe it wasn't very good, but 2to3 was there from the start:

https://docs.python.org/3.0/library/2to3.html

Huh, so it was. Thanks for the correction.