Fresh now solutions is what put us in this situation: distutis2 was fresh, setuptools was fresh, pip was fresh, wheels were fresh... So now you have a lot of complexity that come from having a lot of solutions in parallel that are slow to sunset.
But the dirty secret of python packaging is that most of the problem don't come from packaging, but from boostrapping python. And this is a huge can of worms I didn't even mentioned.
Also, plenty of things require the participations of other communities like debian splitting pip out of the main package or anaconda not being compatible with pip.
All in all, the way you hand wave the problem is typical from the critics that have a very narrow view of the situation.
But the dirty secret of python packaging is that most of the problem don't come from packaging, but from boostrapping python. And this is a huge can of worms I didn't even mentioned.
Also, plenty of things require the participations of other communities like debian splitting pip out of the main package or anaconda not being compatible with pip.
All in all, the way you hand wave the problem is typical from the critics that have a very narrow view of the situation.
If it was that easy, it would have been done.