Empathy?

I pity the setuptools maintainers.

They're keep dragging around a big pile of odorous excrements from two decades of failed approaches to Python packaging, but whenever they make even the slightest attempt at cleaning up this huge mess things break back and forth because there's always this one small, old, unmaintained package, with obscure packaging scripts none understands anymore, that for some obscure reason half the world seems to depend upon, and for which three decades of deprecation period wouldn't be enough.

When they achieve the occasional trace amount of success no one notices, no one appreciates, no one pays.

But when the fail at a mere two percent of existing packages the whole world comes down on them with indignation and outrage, often from people who'd not even in their dreams live up to the standards of maintenance they seem to expect from the volunteer setuptools maintainers.

They never stand any chance. The community doesn't help them, and they don't have any kind of tooling for quality assurance on a scale of 630k packages.

We wouldn't expect a well-paid carpenter to build a skyscraper with but a hammer, but we somehow seem to expect unpaid volunteers to build the seven wonders of Python packaging in their spare time.