A few thoughts: 1) Deprecation messages should say "do X instead" rather than leaving users stranded.  2)  As long as most of our users are still with Python 2.7 we need to avoid deprecations that present obstacles to Python 3 adoption or that increase transition costs.  3)  The adapters have been around for many years; the older the API, the more people people will have come to rely on it.  4) The standard library is expected to be less changeable than third-party modules (we say that the standard library is where code goes to die and it should already be dead on arrival so that the word "standard" has more meaning.