The heart of the problem is that different people are doing different things with Python, and nobody wants to pay cognitive load for what they don't want to use

The heart of the problem is that different people are doing different things with Python, and nobody wants to pay cognitive load for what they don't want to use. The packagers and package tool makers of the world inherit ALL of the technical debt from ALL of the upstream software devs. They're either the liver or the colon. An upstream dev decided to not document which compiler they use during dev time? That's now your problem. A compiler maker (GNU, MSFT, etc.) decides to change how they distribute the C runtime? Congrats, now it's your packaging system's job to know how to differentiate between Windows 7 and Windows 10 running particular versions of Visual Studio. Nobody wants a "single simple unified solution" for packaging more than the packaging tool makers and distro vendors. Believe me. But it's not going to happen until software devs become take more responsibility for what they build upstream, and how they build it.