[zahlman]

I'm trying to make a small, efficient alternative to Pip. I could never realistically get there by starting with Pip and trimming it down, dropping dependencies, reworking the caching strategy etc. etc. But because I've studied Pip (and the problems it solves), I have a roadmap to taking advantage of a new caching strategy (incidentally similar to uv's), etc. - and I'll (probably) never have to introduce (most of) the heavyweight dependencies in the first place.

Understanding doesn't have to come from "being part of the original core team". Although if you aim to be feature-complete and interface-compatible, I'm sure it helps an awful lot.