these are legitimate weaknesses -- thank you for highlighting them. On the other hand, if one can accept these weaknesses, keeping separate the root requirements file and the versions file goes a long way to making the process manageable, and not as chaotic as some might have you believe.

The beef I have with so many explanations of pip is that they tell you to source ".venv/bin/activate" and then "just run pip install whatever" without a) separating the root requirements from the effective/complete requirements, and b) they don't suggest using a wrapper for the ".venv/bin/python3" binary so that execution is the same in all environments.