Most of the things you said in your writeup were no longer true in February 2015, and I think there are no concrete things that you wrote that are true anymore, thanks to the hard work of Python packaging infrastructure maintainers (https://github.com/pypa).
I find the griping a bit over the top. The point of the OP is that new exciting improvements have arrived in the Python packaging infrastructure. Yes, there were many ugly overwrought things in setuptools' past. Yes, npm has several great ideas. npm is also much younger than setuptools/PyPI, and I can cite lots of horror stories from its pre-io.js days too. But the volunteers who got us this far deserve to be recognized for the progress they've made.
I think the biggest legitimate concern right now is how unintuitive it is to use pip in the presence of several Python runtimes/versions.
Yeah, I'm sure things are better. And your typical developer will probably be just fine (I mean, we know they are because Python is so popular!).
But for a beginner who is just trying to figure out how to share his or her code, it's still very confusing. And yes, part of that is definitely the fact that all of the mistakes of the past and their messy workarounds still show up in Google searches, muddying the waters; this obviously gives npm an edge. But even so, I feel that npm just does a better job when it comes to being learnable: people pick it up right away with very little trouble, and you can have your first "public-facing" module up on day one with very little effort. Indeed, in a way, the fact that it's so easy is what's giving it the most grief right now!
So there are definitely lessons to be learned there, for everyone.
I find the griping a bit over the top. The point of the OP is that new exciting improvements have arrived in the Python packaging infrastructure. Yes, there were many ugly overwrought things in setuptools' past. Yes, npm has several great ideas. npm is also much younger than setuptools/PyPI, and I can cite lots of horror stories from its pre-io.js days too. But the volunteers who got us this far deserve to be recognized for the progress they've made.
I think the biggest legitimate concern right now is how unintuitive it is to use pip in the presence of several Python runtimes/versions.