You're right on trusting the core developers, but "for a reason" type arguments are not the way to do things. I love Python because it's so practical and manages to stop codebases from devolving into overengineered incomprehensible messes, but I hate tons lots of things about it, and more generally I hate its "worse is better" approach (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html) to many things (because for Guido, if "worse" is "simpler to explain and implement", he always chooses it, always implementation simplicity over nice "interface" features and also over "interface" consistency... I almost want to shoot the man when I read arguments like http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358 coming from a very smart person like him). OP's complaint is valid imho, consistency is f important, because small inconsistencies pile up and make a language harder to learn (yeah, you don't notice them once they're in your "muscle memory", but "learnability" is important for a language and this is why I like Python and I hope it doesn't lose this quality by slowly accreting inconsistencies). Hopefully his blogpost is a message that reaches Guido and the core developers and nudges them even a little bit towards a better path!