I think you're right, the biggest pain for a general developer for Python is determining which package manager to use. I'm thankfully insulated from it a bit due to using Docker for a lot of my development, but I hate the fact that Pip won't install to your home/project directory unless you coax it to (and sometimes still won't even if you give it all the proper environment variables), and I think virtual environments are not the solution (I shouldn't have to think about how to install a package or work on a project). Especially coming from Node-land, and before that Ruby-land, Python seemed like a wonderfully designed language but with terrible package managers. From what I remember Pip is going to change the default to install on the home directory sometime in the future, but it shouldn't have taken years of discussion to come to the conclusion that it's the right thing to do.