10 years ago I was working at a place that was building Python systems that had dependency graphs too complicated for pip to handle. I was able to solve the problem for my system with a "wheelhouse" system that could compute a list of wheels that could be installed to build it but the confidence of my team in Python had flagged.

I had a sheaf of notes about the problem and figured out the math to build a proper dependency resolver for Python and tested out a lot of ideas such as being able to use http range requests to get the metadata out of wheels on PyPi without having to download the whole wheel.

The problem I had no solution for though was "how to stop developers from trashing the environment that the dependency manager runs in." The data scientists I worked with had an astonishing target for wrecking anything at all. Myself I would have my poetry's environment got bad for reasons I didn't understand every few months ago.

I also found the Python community just didn't care that pip didn't really work right. The most seductive form of blub is "I can accept using things that fail intermittently." I got a job coding Java and Javascript and never built the package manager.

Then uv came along and managed to sell itself as "crazy fast" which did connect with people more than "correct". Written in rust, uv would have beaten my system in the fast department, and since it is a binary, there is no way anyone can screw up a Python it depends on -- as I see it, both technical and marketing genius!