This is right, but also at a fundamental level Gentoo's 'killer feature' has always been a package manager (Portage) that is flexible, modular, portable, mainta

This is right, but also at a fundamental level Gentoo's 'killer feature' has always been a package manager (Portage) that is flexible, modular, portable, maintainable, highly-compatible, efficient. Another package management system over the top of this (pip, flit for python) that doesn't share the same values - in this case doesn't care so much about backwards-compatibility or efficient builds, really breaks Gentoo's potential to provide that experience to its users that is the headline of why people use Gentoo. And the Gentoo devs are therefore forced into filling some of that gap and there's some uneasy compromises in the process.