Chocolatey completely turned me off from Windows package managers. I'm sure you're familiar with all of the sore points that make it more hassle than it's worth.

But your description of AppGet has convinced me to try it out. Thank you!

Edit: There seems to be no obvious way to globally set the install location for apps. This is critical for my setup, I don't install apps in Program Files, because my Windows partition is lean and on an ssd that is shared with other VMs. Apps are installed in another drive location. Is there any way to do this currently?