The new policies *make* the email library that higher level library, that was pretty much the whole point :)  I don't know how to make getting the fully decoded subject more intuitive than:

  msg['subject']

The fact that you have to specify a policy is due to backward compatibility concerns, and there's not really any way around that.  That's the only difference between your two examples (other than the fact that the second one does what you want :).

Note that you *really* want to be using message_from_bytes, and for email either policy.default or policy.SMTP.  This *is* documented in the python3 docs.  If you don't find them clear, then an issue to improve the docs would be welcome.

Since python2 is approaching EOL, we could also start transitioning to policy.default actually being the *default*.  That will take two release cycles (one that will generate a deprecation notice that the default is going to change, and another that will actually make the change).