I don’t agree with your first point. There are no XML parsers as core modules either, and Moose is non-core. Still, Perl has a first-in-class object system and excels at XML parsing.

I didn’t see the pythonistas side of the argument, but I’m not surprised they have similar problems.

Also the recent unicode discussion actually was highlighting real failures in OTHER languages to let you handle malformed data properly. Unfortunately if you read the blogs of many pythonistas they don’t seem to understand this.