No, defaults are important. It's the difference between "doing the right thing by default" and "doing the wrong thing by default."
Unicode may be of little relevance to some disciplines, such as scientific computing for example, but in others, such as modern web development, it is a deal breaker.
I don't need to be told that proper handling of Unicode is important. I know it's important.
I also don't need to be told that defaults are important. I know they're important.
But it is still a minor improvement under the scope of a ~6 year migration that has been absolute hell to everyone involved. Under any other circumstance, I'd be right there with you saying It's A Really Good Thing, but if we have to pay this high of a cost for it, then the improvement here looks pretty meh to me.
If you want to insist on evaluating this on some absolute scale irrespective of its cost, then I don't want anything to do with that.
Finally, one might argue that whether this is actually minor or not is irrelevant. What's relevant is that a boatload of people perceive the delta between Python 2 and Python 3 to be incredibly small, and yet, the amount of work to migrate is dauntingly large. There's a discrepancy there regardless of whether you disagree with others' valuations of the improvements in Python 3.
