The point is that, unlike in the Bitcoin block size debacle, you don't have people who are pulling in different directions because it directly impacts their bottom line if Python does X or Y. There's no one who particularly profits from there being a GIL.
Nobody is pro-GIL per se. But a lot of people were pro-No-Single-Threaded-Performance-Desegregation. The first GIL-removal patch was submitted all the way back against python 1.4, and regular attempts have been made ever since, but it wasn't possible to remove the GIL without making the single threaded performance of existing python code worse, so Guido and co. refused to accept them.