New Python 3.0 string formatting - really necessary?

[r]

I was actually looking forward to 3.0, but the more I hear about 3.0,
the more I am turned off. I think there are a lot of other
pythonista's and pythoneers out there who agree but are not saying
anything. This syntax for string formatting is completely ridiculous.
What is the purpose of breaking backward compatibility just to write a
print() function. This is going to push people away from python. I am
trying to bring people to Python. I heard map is going away too, is
that true also??, and there was talk at one time(serious talk from
Guido) about removing lambda functions. Is this planned for the
future??

Python has been beautifully designed from the beginning. But, I feel a
shift from this now. Are they scared of Ruby, if they are, why the
hell should they be. We do not need to lose any of the great
pythonista's right now, and we damn sure don't want to turn off the
new recruits.

It seems like most of the backward breaks are really just for dumb
reasons(sorry but its true). What is the logic behind this? The whole
reason for not having a print function was the need to use it so much
in debugging. And I was actually going to overlook that until I saw
this perl/ruby like format method. WTF!