Weird, I thought that Python was trying to discourage functional programming with its extremely limited lambdas and the proposal to move map and reduce out of the core language.
I think the argument against map and reduce was that there was better and more Pythonic ways to do both - not because they were 'too functional'.
Moving from Scala to Python it was annoying at first.. but honestly the code is easier to read in most cases, so no complaints here.
I kinda agree. Certainly it guards against some of the code you see in overly nested javascript.
The downside is that the code is slightly removed from it's call site - but rarely by much.
Overall the increased complexity it would bring to the language has not been justified by anyone arguing for it's benefits. Giving the function a name isn't the worst thing in the world.