Yeah, I was around for the sidelines of PEP-461, reintroducing % onto the bytes type, trying to get things done behind the scenes, and it was just a miserable experience all around. I don't think anybody cared to understand our concerns about why we should bother making the bytes type useful. At times it seemed like they believed leaving in the concatenation on the bytes type was a mistake.

Read through the receipts here: https://bugs.python.org/issue3982