[dannyz]

From a user point of view Python packaging has probably never been better, but it is still a huge mess from anyone having to maintain these projects which might explain some of the dichotomy in the comments.

In my experience most of these packaging tools work fine for pure Python packages, it is when you try and bundle extensions in a cross-platform way that things get really messy. For better or worse I think third party package managers somewhat outside the Python ecosystem, i.e. conda + conda-forge, are the only tools that get this right.