I’ve had similar problems as others posting here have. To be honest when I’ve had to do symbolic math at work (usually some combination of computational geomet

I’ve had similar problems as others posting here have. To be honest when I’ve had to do symbolic math at work (usually some combination of computational geometry and PDEs), I typically fall back to maxima or Mathematica (if my collaborators also have licenses). Those systems are quite solid and very mature when it comes to symbolic work, and I never saw any value in using SymPy since I can get to maxima from Python via Sage. I will admit though: I tend to not do that since I’m usually pretty happy in maxima or Mathematica directly and don’t see a reason to complicate things with a layer of Python. I taught a course a couple years back where I tried to use sympy since we were using a bunch of other Python tools (numpy, scipy, etc...), and the sympy part felt very awkward. I think I remember showing the students maxima and Mathematica to convince them that computers really could do complex symbolic work and not to get too turned off by the Python tools.