You're not being rude at all. The extension module documentation, including this blog post, says to use Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler for Python 2.7. I couldn

You're not being rude at all. The extension module documentation, including this blog post, says to use Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler for Python 2.7. I couldn't get it to work properly, and I tried the other toolchains after quite a bit of research, a word which here means "reading through the Python source code and trying various search terms in a vain attempt to solve a problem that apparently isn't a problem for anyone else, but they can't be bothered to specify their obviously functional build environments in sufficient detail for me, an expert in the art, to recreate in a clean virtual machine here at home". It was only after this little endeavour of mine that I came to appreciate people's work on reproducible builds, Vagrant, etc. And you aren't kidding about that VS2015 install taking forever and a day. Updates are almost as bad.