[atonparker]

NPM 2 was and is not broken. There are ~200,000 packages on the NPM registry, and ~2,700,000,00 downloads in the last month. In the past four years it has done wonderful things for node.js and javascript development in general. The nested dependency tree worked great on *nix systems. Was the max path on Windows annoying? Of course it was. But stop pretending like it completely prevented you from accomplishing anything. And if you were deploying to a Windows server why did you pick an ecosystem and package manager that has always made it clear that Windows is a second class citizen? There are always trade offs.

Now NPM 3 has worked around the utterly idiotic max path on Windows at the cost of slower installs. That's also annoying. It's also temporary. Just wait a little, and keep using NPM 2 if speed is your top concern.