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> I hold up Bundler as one of the great success stories of open source

It's a great success in many ways, but the problem it solves is completely self-inflicted by rubygems. I've also been doing Ruby for over a decade, but I've also learned a lot from other library ecosystems, and I feel pretty confident saying that disallowing version ranges makes all those headaches completely evaporate.

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I'm with you that version ranges cause problems, but my belief is that lockfiles are a better solution.

Generally I'd use semver ranges in libraries, and then fixed versions + lockfiles for transitive deps in applications.

I suppose this is roughly equivalent to doing `:pedantic :abort` in leiningen, except you wont't have as many warning to squash - either way you have to rely on the test suite to tell you if the versions you've pegged work.

I've also been on that journey and am starting to feel the same way about variance.

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