Empathy?

In point of fact, `venv` *is* part of the standard library, and pip is bootstrapped by the standard library `ensurepip`.

The main advantage of this setup is that it allows pip to be developed by a separate team, *with a separate release cadence*, which also automatically backports the new features to all the currently-supported Python versions (all the pip team has to do is test on those versions and be conservative about using new Python features).

The downside is that this model encourages copying pip into each virtual environment separately, and considerable know-how is required to manage a single copy of pip and empower it to install cross-environment (even though it *should* be easy and even though there's really nothing about being written in Python that actually causes a problem for this). There's also generally low awareness that pip (since version 22.3) *can* install cross-environment (although it uses a pretty brutal hack for this internally).

As for Setuptools, my understanding is that PEP 517 (and to a lesser extent 518 and 621) was *explicitly* designed to solicit alternative build backends. And there was really never a good way and a good moment to extract "just a" build backend from the project.