Ah, yeah they do have a Python 3.11 release, just not on anaconda. Okay, yeah, for a couple of years now there isn't a good reason anymore to use anaconda anyways.
I see myself as interested in commercial exploitation of transformers right now and I am delighted with the results. The first time I tried clustering all the Ukraine articles lumped together, all the sports were lumped, it runs 5x faster than my LDA-based clustering system and I think does a better job. With results like this I am happy to trade ‘cutting edge’ for convenience.
I have thought about a ‘path less followed’ in Python which is a truly sound package manager like maven for Python (as opposed to Poetry which I’m not sure is sound but it sure is slow) and I can say I like the way conda works I just would rather do it with wheels. One beef I have with conda is that the bzip2 files are slow to decompress and even over a DSL line I would trade a little more downloading for faster installs.
I think of Anaconda envs as great back ends for Jupyter notebooks. There is still a place for it.