I'm not following this. Can you give examples of features in node?

Given, the quality of things in any community repo, and the namespacing, are often terrible, but this hasn't ever kept me from using good things out of it.

I'm also not sure how it can be a step backwards, as Python is quite a bit older :)

One thing I don't like about npm is folks are starting to store non-npm things in it, which I think may because of the weird situation of npm getting funding. I don't understand that just as much as I wouldn't understand PyPi or CPAN getting funding :)

The key difference between pypi and npm is that if you pull a package down and it depends on something==1.0.2 and you depend directly on the incompatible something==0.8.9 both version live together in peace because only request will use 1.0.2. With pypi (and most other dependency management systems) you'll have to make a choice on which one you want to use and in this example you'll have to choose an older version of the library depending on something==1.0.2.

This has been largely solved with virtualenvs where those collisions happen on the system level, but I concede it's harder when the mutually incompatible requirements are in the same project.

If I'm understanding the question correctly, I agree virtualenv + virtualenvwrapper solves it mostly. For what I consider a decent treatment of some of the shortcomings in pip vs. npm, I found this post helpful:

"Things I wish Pip learned from Npm" https://medium.com/@alonisser/things-i-wish-pip-learned-from...

I've done just a small amount of work with node, but as a professional Python dev, I very much agree that package management is one of (if not the most) significant downsides of our ecosystem.

One feature I'd love to have personally is a clear way to manage only direct dependencies, but have reproducible builds in pip. @nvie has done some great work in this space [0][1], but not all of us have caught up yet. :)

0: http://nvie.com/posts/pin-your-packages/

1: http://nvie.com/posts/better-package-management/

anaconda solves this