The "writing has been on the wall" is not an excuse, it's mostly blackmail ("port or else you wont run on 3, and we'll stop the 2.x line"). And most people didn't (and shouldn't) fall for that.
So let me get this straight.
1. A bunch of people you've never met and probably have never paid or financially supported,
2. Gave you a high-quality programming language, for free, to use for any purpose you liked,
3. And then when you and they disagreed about the best way forward in a new version, you claimed their refusal to continue supporting and adding new features to the old version for you, for free, essentially forever, constitutes "blackmail" on their part.
1) You frame this as some single random individual on HN is the only one that is concerned with the switch.
2) You seem to have missed that companies and individuals that do dislike the switch have contributed to the Python ecosystem, from employing core developers in the past, to creating frameworks, libraries etc that helped Python succeed.
3) You have missed the fact that some (a lot? most?) of the concerned people have actually donated to the PSF through its PayPal donate link (as I've done in the past, and I've used Python since 1998).
4) You seem to think that an open source community project is pretty much "anything goes" and end users be damned. And then the team can complain about "lack of adoption" for the new version.
So, do you still think it's "blackmail" when something you were getting for free decides to no longer support the version you like?
Python 3 adoption has been rising for a couple years now as people realize that A) Python 3 is a quite nice language, B) porting to Python 3 is not as hard as people keep claiming it is, and C) Python 2 is going to run out of zero-dollar-cost support one day as the number of people willing to support it without being paid for their trouble diminishes.
If someone does want to commit to supporting Python 2 + backported Python 3 features, they are of course welcome to do so provided they observe the license and trademark terms (not terribly hard to do). But I suspect it won't last very long, at least not as a small-team zero-dollar-cost project. Between Python 3 gaining steam and people staying on 2 in order to avoid work and expense, I just don't think it's going to work out on the kind of decades-long horizon the Python 2 die-hards seem to want.
So let me get this straight.
1. A bunch of people you've never met and probably have never paid or financially supported,
2. Gave you a high-quality programming language, for free, to use for any purpose you liked,
3. And then when you and they disagreed about the best way forward in a new version, you claimed their refusal to continue supporting and adding new features to the old version for you, for free, essentially forever, constitutes "blackmail" on their part.
Do I have that right?