[pwang]

The reason and motivation for Anaconda is precisely to help people avoid the "fun" you alluded to of building numpy/scipy/etc. from source. Even on systems which provide the right compiler and headers and runtime libs for a given version of Python downloaded from Python.org, it's nontrivial to ensure that you're going to get an optimal build. And furthermore, once you have that build working, you have to maintain your build toolchain to ensure that you can build future packages that have native source.

Anaconda does not force a "divergence" from using anything. You can still build and pip install to your heart's delight. It just provides a baseline of the more complex-to-build packages, all built in such a way as to be compatible with each other at the C level.