I wonder if there's a compromise: Pex 3 drops support for Python 2, and Pants by default uses Pex 3 But you can still use Pex 2 by changing

[download-pex-bin]

if you don't use certain features like lockfiles. You are not going to get The Full Pants Experience, but you will still get lots of benefits like dep inference and migration support via

py-constraints

goal. We would create a guide for what those limitations are, and we would write tests to ensure that the baseline experience is still adequate