many bad programmers are trying Python, and thus hijacking it, promoting it as something it didn't use to be. I'm not even sure if these could be considered a majority, but they're noisy.

Yes, your observation reminds me of a noisy Python lover at work who never tired of telling everyone how much he loved Python and hated Perl because Python was so much more "readable" than Perl ... until later outed (during code reviews) as a mediocre Python programmer.

Update: it turns out he hated Perl based on appearances and hearsay because he'd never actually written a Perl program! (Stroustrup noticed similar bigotry towards C++ "twice as many people claimed to hate C++ as had ever written even a single small C++ program").

It seems that Python can have a superficial attraction to mediocre programmers (even non-programmers!) because it looks like English ... so they think they understand it ... and then marvel at its magical powers of "readability" :) ... while Perl looks like line noise ... which reminds me of the famous Larry Wall quote:

I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?'

BTW, I accidentally discovered when writing The Lighter Side of Perl Culture (Part III): Obfu that Python obfus exist! I also met some very capable Python hackers when playing code golf and really liked them. Python is nowadays a much more popular code golfing language than Perl - which surprises a lot of people.