My perspective is it's useful for data scientists who are more likely to be 1) working on Windows 2) using packages with compiled extensions 3) less likely to h

My perspective is it's useful for data scientists who are more likely to be 1) working on Windows 2) using packages with compiled extensions 3) less likely to have the system management background to properly deal with 1 & 2 in CPython. I take Anaconda at their word that they are a different distribution of Python and conda is a tool to manage Anaconda environments, which includes more than just Python. I find it difficult to completely trust them as a for-profit company that is putting itself between Python programmers and the actual community package repos. I don't think there is any particular advantage to Conda unless you are support the use cases I described above, but good people disagree sincerely on it.