This isn't good news because it means we are going to be suffering along with setuptools even longer, which is substantially the cause of all the packaging pain in Python.

If it made sense to reject distutils2 as having too much cruft, it makes even less sense to accept setuptools which will be even cruftier and provide an eternal excuse not to switch to anything better

It certainly wasn't ever the problem that "distribute is not enough like setuptools" which is all this should "solve".

I was not saying "distribute is not enough like setuptools", but rather meant I'm glad the author of distribute is taking over setuptools, with the maintainer of setuptools 'retiring'.