[Athas]

> I think it's less that Go has significantly different needs, but it's more that people overestimate what their actual needs are.

I think you are right. And I doubt it hurts that SAT solving is a fun problem!

My main package management experience has been with Haskell, which has used the cabal tool for many years. Cabal was a traditional solver-based tool (with the added pain of a global mutable package database, although that is going away), and it frequently broke down in confusing ways. Cabal hell was a widely used term. A few years ago, another tool arrived on the scene, Stack, which used the same package format and such as cabal, but snapshotted the central package list (Hackage) by gathering subsets of packages and versions that were guaranteed to work together (or at least do not have conflicting bounds). It works well[0], and although it does in principle result in a major loss in flexibility, it's rarely something I miss. Importantly, the improvement in reliability was nothing short of astounding. That certainly helped convince me that flexibility may not be a needed feature for a (language) package manager.

[0]: There are all sorts of socio-political stack/cabal conflicts in the Haskell community now, but I'm not sure they are founded in technical issues.