2to3?

> yeah, right. If you don't use strings ("just treat strings as bags of bytes"), then you don't need to use strings.

That is correct. The problem is that the type for string literals in Python is, well, a string. It pops up in a myriad of places in the standard library.

For example, the exception message is (you guessed it) a string.

> That's trivially true and I don't see the problem. Just use bytes.

Well, I recommend you to try your own advice.