When the fundamental design of the language is stacked against your style of working, the cognitive dissonance of using so many workarounds is a serious problem.
I just switched to Lua during the Python 2 to 3 transition, and I haven't looked back. Real closures and tail calls, no GIL, a vastly more tasteful design, a dead-simple C API, and the whole shebang is a tenth the size of Python.
Meant to add: Lua's not perfect, but its whole design favors embedding it in another language, so it's a hell of a lot better about gracefully getting out of the way when it's better to write the parts that matter in other languages.
I just switched to Lua during the Python 2 to 3 transition, and I haven't looked back. Real closures and tail calls, no GIL, a vastly more tasteful design, a dead-simple C API, and the whole shebang is a tenth the size of Python.