I don't think it's half a day to get proficient, it's half a day to hack something half working together so they're unblocked and can do the other stuff they want to do.

And then another half a day to get pissed off because you don't remember what settings are/are not in your venv and trying to exit and/or get back into the venv (assuming no prior experience with venv)

Fundamentally venv breaks your conceptions of what a shell is through cleverness, and that's a problem for people who are new.

Half a day to get something running that's a "one off" for you is insane. With a compiled language project, I'd download a binary. In Python, I need to reproduce the developer's setup. And I've yet to find two different Python projects where the official build instructions are compatible -- each one recommends a different environment virtualizer, a different runtime, different settings, and different C libraries that aren't part of the virtualized environment.

The thing that drives me insane about Python packaging is the degree of Stockholm Syndrome. PYTHON PACKAGING HAS KIDNAPPED YOU. YOU DON’T ACTUALLY LOVE IT.

None of Go, JavaScript, or Rust require a half a day to figure out packaging. Don’t defend Python. Push for it to change or leave it behind.

Half a day is an eternity when it is makework.

Trudging through old SO answers, bad docs, GitHub issues, overly enthusiastic blog posts by someone making a todo app, and, the coup de gras: hitting paywalls on the one tutorial that might help you.

Factor in much higher rates for more senior devs and it amounts to a lot of waste.

This whole thread is a discussion of ease vs. simplicity. Easiness is subjective, simplicity is not. We should not compare tools in terms of their ease of use. There was a famous talk on this, maybe someone can link.