First, entering a string at the command prompt like this is not considered "printing"; it's invoking the repr().

Then, when you say flexible, you say it as if it's a good thing.  In this context "flexible" means as much as "easy to produce mojibake" and is not desirable.

For all these use cases, there are ways to do the right thing with Unicode strings in Python 2 (e.g. using io.open instead of builtin open).  But making these the builtin case was the big gain of Python 3.