I seriously doubt anyone had problems fixing print as a statement. 2to3 fixed it...
I'll admit that, yes, changing string to bytes and unicode to string was a bit annoying, but the change itself wasn't fundamentally 'of dubious benefit', it did have benefits, and related to this, the only major issue was that you couldn't, for a long time, have code that worked in both where it came to literals. The biggest problem here was the implicit conversion from 2, that I agree needed to go.
Most of the other things can be trivially fixed automatically, or at least detected automatically, but without type hinting, it wasn't really easy to fix the automatic conversion.
There were other changes that were a bit tricky, but the majority of issues stemmed from the str/bytes change.
I'll admit that, yes, changing string to bytes and unicode to string was a bit annoying, but the change itself wasn't fundamentally 'of dubious benefit', it did have benefits, and related to this, the only major issue was that you couldn't, for a long time, have code that worked in both where it came to literals. The biggest problem here was the implicit conversion from 2, that I agree needed to go.
Most of the other things can be trivially fixed automatically, or at least detected automatically, but without type hinting, it wasn't really easy to fix the automatic conversion.
There were other changes that were a bit tricky, but the majority of issues stemmed from the str/bytes change.