I've been using python for years now, I don't know the last time I had to use `sys.stdin`. I (like most people) deal with `open`, and unicode-only file apis (or the very nice things like flask that mitsuhiko and others have built). For most people, this isn't a problem.

I've migrated literally, 10s of thousands, of files from py2 to 3. I've yet to encounter an issue with surrogateescapes or sys.stdin. Unicode issues yes, but mostly because we were previously being fast-and-loose with unicode vs. bytes, and mishandling, for example, emojis.