Any problems still haunting pyinstaller and co. at this point will also show up for APEs, and solving them when you only have a lowest common denominator toolset at disposal will be harder.
I like APEs btw.
Like after I wrote this blog post, I wrote a small Python app using Flask/SQLite/D3.js, put everything in a single file, just copied it onto computers with Debian/Fedora/FreeBSD/Win10, and now I just access the info I need on those systems via the browser. Providing a browser GUI makes it easier for my colleagues as well, some of whom don't use terminals at all :)
For C extensions (where I've stubbed my toes quite a bit with PyInstaller), I think a nice goal with APE Python would be to have a website like Christoph Gohlke's (https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/), where you just select the packages you would like, and you download them compiled as a single-file executable you can use anywhere. This is an interesting problem, and there's been some work towards solving it, let's see if we can have an elegant solution.
Have you done a study?
This reminds me of when I've seen people say things like, "X is a showstopper for me when it comes to C++ [or whatever]", and someone responds, "That's not a problem in practice. People who write C++ don't care about X". And it's like, "Well, yeah, that's the nature of 'showstoppers'—all the people who do care about X noped out a long time ago." It's an intellectually dishonest way to justify choosing not to confront the X problem.