With boto, I battled for years trying to avoid any dependencies. But that has a lot of negative side effects, too. One of the great things about Python is the amazing variety and quality of libraries available. We decided to embrace that with AWS CLI. We have 10 direct dependencies. Four of those are our own packages that we decided to split to allow maximum reuse. Then there are fundamental things like requests, six, docutils. The rest are things that, we think, improve the experience. Virtualenv is an awesome way to manage this. I highly recommend it.

I feel like it's a valid concern for someone to want to know what's on their system. Sure virtualenv is a great solution, and I'm sure the person you're responding to knows about it. But there is a place for skepticism in required dependencies, and perhaps the OP parses Perl better than Python.

If you want to use RPM packaging those 26 dependencies will be rather painful.

There are pros and cons to both sides.