f-strings work well in simple cases. But once the things you want to output are somewhat larger expressions, format() works much better.
Example: instead of something like
print(f'{id:<5} | {", ".join(members}:<50} | {", ".join(str(score) for score in scores):<30}')
This is much clearer IMO: print('{:<5} | {:<50} | {:<30}'.format(
id,
", ".join(members),
", ".join(str(score) for score in scores),
))
Actually, what do you mean by "ugly" and "UGLINESS" in "the ugly str.format(UGLINESS) syntax"? The UGLINESS are simply the things you want to format. Ugly is in the of the beholder of course; personally I don't really see anything ugly about format. The f-string equivalent here is much uglier and much less clear/readable to me, because the formatting and the expressions are mixed and parsing the whole thing to see what is what is more effort than it should be.