I'd say we have a fairly good existing theory that explains modern package management: Conway's Law. We self-organize into communities of practice and select t

I'd say we have a fairly good existing theory that explains modern package management: Conway's Law. We self-organize into communities of practice and select the package management strategy that works best. Reaching across communities to develop a grand centralized strategy that fits everyone's needs would be __possible__, but involves significant communication and coordination overhead. So instead we fracture, and the tooling ecosystem reflects ad-hoc organizational units within the community. Ecosystems like Rust cargo that have batteries included from the start have an advantage, virtually all Rust developers have a single obvious path to package management because of this emergent social organization. Ecosystems like Python's seem like the wild west, there is deep fracturing (particularly between data science and software engineering) and no consensus on the requirements or even the problems. So Python fractures further, ironically in a search for something that can eventually unify the community. And python users feel the strain of this additional overhead every day, needing to side with a team just to get work done. I'd argue both of these cases are driven by consequences easily predictable from Conway's Law.