Re: I am nervous about the decline of tools other than git.

In general, I agree with you, although your example isn't a good one since we're only talking about the principal maintainer for a project stepping aside, presumably to be able to do other things with his time, rather than advocating the abandonment of the project.

Meanwhile, people are strongly discouraged from doing anything with Python 2. Firstly, there are indications that anyone developing it independently would have to call it something else or face action over use of the trademark, hence the potential naming of Stackless Python as just "Stackless" if any kind of "2.8" release were to occur. Secondly, there is a certain amount of peer pressure from the core development community against any further development of Python 2, although I note that GvR seems to want some of the type annotations stuff backported to 2.7 so that Dropbox can take advantage of it. Thirdly, a lot of the "messaging" that has taken place in the last decade has involved telling people that Python 3 is what they should be using, even before it was a viable choice, and so there has been a deliberate policy of undermining any community around Python 2 by making everyone regard it as legacy software (and thus undermining Python in general, but there you go).