[karamazov]

Package managers are great until you want something that isn't provided. I used numpy as an example, but our users are just as likely to work with web scraping, SQL, or REDIS as with numerical computations; in that case, they still need to know how to manage packages themselves.

[traeblain]

The installers don't stop the user from learning how to manage their packages. Other than Anaconda, the installers still emphasis using easy_install or pip. But what these do that many people don't understand is that when you do hit a compiling problem, it's often easier to find a pre-compiled package and simply install. So for you other examples, lxml is another notoriously difficult to get running on Windows. So you are stuck with a less efficient BeautifulSoup or not able to use PyQuery. So an installer for young python users is a godsend. As they dig deeper into python, the items you highlight are naturally developed.

(Don't get me wrong, by the way, props for helping out the often less technical Windows crowd.)