My experience was similar. An even bigger push in my case was the async stuff in 3.5.

It's going to be a little while before pypy supports 3.5, but once that happens, Python will be very well placed. Something like Tornado + pypy + py3.5 looks a lot like the app server stack of the future IMHO.

It has been a massive PITA, and probably could have been better handled, but hindsight is easy. The future looks bright.