It also, IMHO, has a much higher "clarity" quotient - Rails is a lot of magic for me, while Django is, in the end, much less religion and much more clear. (I will acknowledge that I chose Python and subsequently Django because they spoke to me personally, but seriously, Django's documentation is second perhaps only to Redis.)
If you don't want to use Python 3, keep using Python 2 through its EOL in 2020+ but why interfere with other people happily using and preferring Python 3 for years now? It is not interfering with you.
Agreed, browser support was probably unrealistic.
However other points still stand.
Python 3 was a mistake. It at the wrong time (too late), and didn't bring enough. The talks, and the time, and drama around it weren't worth to get dict comprehension and unicode support.
A 10x speed improvement (heck, just a 2x) would have been. Better IO handling via something sane like lightweight threads (via an already existing framework like gevent or eventlet). Better packaging. Better default GUI library. Refresh the standard library with something like requests, ipython...
Python had a golden opportunity and it squandered it. There were
I love python, it's probably my favorite language. I taught a class on it in Boston. But these exact questions have indeed brought doubts into my mind.
Year after year I'm disappointed by what python simply cannot provide in any straightforward way. The options are very few for making games. The options are very few for desktop GUI (I tried to do PyQt and then discovered QML with JavaScript and quickly left python behind for that project). The options are few for back-end web development-- yes, there's Django, but it just doesn't have the clarity, documentation, and community that Rails has, or Wordpress (different type of entity, I know), or many others. Flask is amazing but small in scope and community.
I'm a professional JS developer by day and I used to think JS was awful for teaching, because the functional side of it is nightmarishly confusing IN GENERAL, let alone to someone new to programming. Its objective/prototypal system takes quite a bit of getting used to, also, and it has many other quirks.
But, for the EXACT reasons mentioned in this linked post, I changed my mind. The fact that JS can be used for almost anything nowadays, is ubiquitously in demand, has a massive, massive worldwide "community," and allows easy GUI manipulation via HTML/CSS, makes it the best candidate for teaching by far.
It'll just take some careful consideration as for how to approach it best.