We took at least one immediate practical good piece of advice out of this which is that we should release a conda package and make sure that dlt works in it.
I wouldn't make it a high priority. If there's one thing I know about conda users it's that "no conda package available" has never stopped them. In fact they prefer to pip install inside their conda environment, and the only conda packages they use are the ones that touch Nvidia drivers (e.g. pytorch).
> "no conda package available" has never stopped them.
Yes and no. They won't stop because they want to get things done, and the things usually don't involve honing the infrastructure. But installing packages with pip usually breaks conda installation, not even a particular virtual environment. (Usually pip nukes the setuptools that come with conda, and then once you want to install / upgrade anything in base environment, you discover that it's toast because conda itself depends on setuptools, but it's now broken and cannot be reinstalled).
So, in practice, if you give up and use pip to install stuff, it means that for the next project you will be reinstalling conda (and you will probably lose all your previous virtual environments). Kinda sucks.