That's the problem, there's more things you need to debug, since PBR does not get rid of any of the problems that you encounter with setuptools or pip, but adds

That's the problem, there's more things you need to debug, since PBR does not get rid of any of the problems that you encounter with setuptools or pip, but adds its own. Trying to paper over the (real) problems with the Python packaging toolchain by generating setup.py from a config file strikes me as a vanity project.