All they wanted was to fork the project to "clean up" the code in ways they wanted, manage the community themselves, etc. It wasn't like all their patches were flawless and Bram just wouldn't accept them.
Just dumping any old code into a project the first time it's demanded is a sign not of enlightened maintenance but of gross negligence. It's good if there's a lot of feedback on patches, it's not some kind of aggression.
What does PG need to improve, then? I see a lot of discussion of how Oracle is better at this or that but not much discussion on how PG will come to parity and how we'll know when it's finally good enough to use.
It's worse than that. You're not just choosing a reliable solution, or even a solution with a conservative reputation so that your butt is covered. You're choosing a solution which may actually be worse because when you fail to deliver for someone else, you have someone to scapegoat. If there is nobody else to blame, you might take the blame for having chosen open source with no specific party to blame (the hot potato stopped with you).
You can absolutely do string handling in a common subset of Python 2 and Python 3. It won't work for legacy string handling code if you relied on implicit coercion, but then the same apps are unlikely to support unicode either.
We've already had tools like 2to3, but they weren't all that popular, and this won't be either. Most things are ported to Python 3 now and most new projects just use Python 3. Never fear.
Google produced more relevant results than Altavista. That's about it. They didn't build or save the internet. Without them, search engines would have improved anyway and we'd be just fine. Google was never a charity and we don't have to protect such corporate behemoths from criticism.
Ironic since Ansible's lack of Python 3 support was due to vociferous insistence by key Ansible developers that it would be wrong even to allow the use of Ansible with Python 3 as long as popular CentOS versions did not have it.
What product needed to be built that harnessed HTTP, when it was first created? It wasn't Google, Facebook and pets.com right away. It took a lot of time to figure that out. There is a place for foundational work, it's just hard to get funded for it.
Let's say you developed a Python-like language called Python 2.6, can you call on the Python-2.5 community to convert all old code? Come on, nobody was forced at gunpoint to port to Python 3, that's why there are still abandoned Python 2 projects all over the Cheese Shop.
This is simply not true. For example, Python 2.6 deprecated string exceptions. If you expect in any language to write code and have it run forever, you expect that language never to change.