This discussion should probably be submitted as a new RFE (requesting "text" as a more obvious and beginner friendly alias for universal_newlines), but I'll also add a note regarding precedent for a simple binary/text toggle: the mode settings for open().

There, the default is text (with the default encoding determined by the system), and you have to include "b" in the mode settings to say "I want raw binary".

For the subprocess APIs, the default is different (i.e. binary), so the natural counterpart to the "b" mode flag in open() would be an explicit "text" mode flag.