The rest is indeed opinion. The opinion of the python community after almost 10 (!) years after after the first release is quiet obvious: 3.x sucks!
I just don't know from where all the 3.x apologist appear as soon as there is a discussion. There always appears to be an inherent need to somehow defend this complete failure.
Performance can be measured. And what better way than at scale. Facebook wrote an article a while back about how all new code is written in python3, and they are seeing huge performance wins because of it.
Most of the performance gains seem to come from the async/await stuff which is a rather late development which has actually nothing to do with any 3.x features. Could be done with 2.x as well.
Async/await is a 3.5+ language feature, and Python's core integration of async support, both at a language level and in the standard library, is all 3.x stuff.
Some of it you could do with 3rd party libraries and no syntactic support in 2.x, but it's absolutely false to say async has nothing to do with any 3.x features.
Let's just say that Python 3 is, in fact, slower than Python 2. Performance is only part of what makes a language great. In fact, if you need raw performance, Python is not the language to go. Most of my performance intensive code run with NumPy or Pandas, which is not Python anyway and are not at all affected.
I'm also not sure how you got the impression that everyone thinks Python 3 sucks. The fact that you see "apologist" might mean something?
Funny, I was just wondering where all of these 2.x fans who think that porting to 3 is harder than re-writing everything in Go show up from as soon as there's a discussion. There always appears to be an inherent need to somehow describe choices that make sense for the majority of the community as a complete failure, when they're really working out just fine.
The rest is indeed opinion. The opinion of the python community after almost 10 (!) years after after the first release is quiet obvious: 3.x sucks!
I just don't know from where all the 3.x apologist appear as soon as there is a discussion. There always appears to be an inherent need to somehow defend this complete failure.