It WAS a long slog yes. But now it's pretty much done. And there really was no way to fix the unicode issue without a big painful transition.
> anything older than a few weeks tends to randomly break with some kind of dependency issue
I absolutely do not have this issue. Maybe you're using libraries very different from what I do? But I do think I have pretty wide interests/projects...
> sometimes requiring multiple installations of python on the same machine which will bite each other in hard to predict ways
I don't know what you're talking about here. Do you have an example?
> I've yet to be able to write something in python and call it 'finished' because it never ever continues to work in the longer term.
I don't have this experience.