Losing development momentum for a beancounting reason like this one is a sure way to kill a project. It works every time. Once development is halted, it is very difficult to pick it back up.

Python isn't a side project to yolo on. Updating the GC without a PEP caused massive issues for actual people using Python. If you want to impact software used by millions of developers then you better be willing to handle a bit of process.

The JIT project already lost a lot of momentum when the people working on it lost their jobs (at Microsoft)..