I wasn't aware that anybody on Hacker News had an implicit moral obligation to "not harm the morale of new programmers", especially in cases where it might be a

I wasn't aware that anybody on Hacker News had an implicit moral obligation to "not harm the morale of new programmers", especially in cases where it might be a open question if said programmers are "wasting their time." Also, there's a third choice if you have a better idea about how package managers could work: you can use an existing alternative that works better. If said existing alternative happens to be in some other language, and you don't have a strong reason to stay on your current language, then switching languages is perfectly sensible.