If you want to add your own project to Conda, you need to use conda forge, because Anaconda itself is a curated distribution.

Maintaining a conda forge package has been, for us, a complete nightmare. If you depend on another conda-forge package you can have the issue that the library is configured to suit whoever first wrote the conda-forge package - i.e. by disabling parallelism or providing only shared/static libraries, and have that maintainer be completely unresponsive or unwilling to change it.

That is a downside of community maintenance, for sure. Conda-forge probably needs official policies and suggested workflows to have multiple varieties of recipes where feasible. There is never a one-size-fits-all solution when a community serves so many different people with so many different use cases. Spack fits the "my way and only my way" mentality better. Conda is more "close enough, and already ready for me to use."

If you let us know about the package, we can work with you to create a variant.

conda / miniconda has definitely solved most of my grievances with deploying python applications

how does conda solve this? Will conda fallback to pip if the conda repository doesn't contain one of your dependencies?

With your conda environment activated, you can run pip install requirements.txt. You don't have to use any of the conda commands outside of creating the environment.