[otabdeveloper4]

a. you hit tons of problems getting everything to work fine with python - of course, but the maintenance burden is an order of magnitude lower than integrating all this manually.

b. No, docker is not a solution. Docker is another problem and a separate maintenance nightmare.

(Nix solves maintenance problems at scale, Docker explodes them exponentially. I would not ever recommend using Docker for anything except personal computing devices you don't care about.)

[yeck]

I agree.

There are many python packages that have other dependencies not managed by Python package management. The pain of figuring out what those implicit dependencies are is effectively removed for users when configured as a nix shell.