That's a good point. One of the original appeals of Python is that it started as a pedagogical language, and it shows. Even Python2 today still has most of that feel.
Python3 on the other hand, just isn't. You're pretty much required to constantly deal with Unicode and its related issues, and this is a burden for beginners. In Python2, you can kick that can down the road almost indefinitely.
That hasn't been my experience. In Python 2 your program would appear to work fine initially, but the first time your data happens to contain a non-ASCII character you would get a mysterious UnicodeDecodeError somewhere far away from where the actual problem is.
In Python 3 it just works again, like it did in Python 1.5, before the whole str/unicode implicit-conversion mess was introduced in Python 2.
Python3 on the other hand, just isn't. You're pretty much required to constantly deal with Unicode and its related issues, and this is a burden for beginners. In Python2, you can kick that can down the road almost indefinitely.