[jjoonathan]

"You can't use the big channel with all the packages because it has all the packages" isn't an exoneration, it's an indictment.

To answer your question: yes, we were using conda-forge, and then when it stopped building we moved to a mix of conda and a critical subchannel, and then a major GIS library broke on conda and stayed that way for months so we threw in the towel and just used pip + a few touch-up scripts. Now that everyone else has followed suit, pip is the place where things "just work" so now we just use pip, no touchups required.