I'm not the OP you're asking a question of, but agree with the OP's position. In my experience the manual operations required by Go (basically just doing a git

I'm not the OP you're asking a question of, but agree with the OP's position. In my experience the manual operations required by Go (basically just doing a git/mecurial fork into my own repo and git/mercurial updates as desired) may not be "faster" in the sense of requiring less keystrokes or whatever your measurement is, but it is more predictable and understandable, and not too much "slower". More complicated dependency management systems are great when they work, and then suddenly a huge pain in the ass when they fail in some edge case, the Go way of doing dependency management might require a very tiny bit more effort but pays that off by being much more transparent.