It takes precedence in the path over everything...and in the last version I used (before I upgraded to OS X El Capitain and wiped out everything), things like `curl` were provided [1] ...which I completely understand for Anaconda's use case, but it caused a lot of confusing grief to me when I hadn't expected that and OpenSSL was having its rough times.

I don't know if that's the case (curl being part of the package) now, with Anaconda 3 2.4.0+? It certainly isn't so when installed via pyenv, so I'm happy with that. But there were other issues in the past build...BeautifulSoup was inexplicably broken. I mean that it simply did not correctly parse non-trivial HTML pages and yet threw no errors. The results could be replicated for all of my students but I never could isolate the issue... I installed Python 3 and the same version of BS4 from scratch and had no problems, but I can't imagine where the Anaconda build would have gotten wrong. It ended up being OK since I just switched to lxml which I now happily use over BS4 on any day, but it was frustrating to not be able to diagnose the problem (I didn't get a response in the support forums either). I'm assuming this problem has gone away in subsequent versions of Anaconda though I haven't tried since lxml is perfectly fine to me.

And finally...well, I have to admit it, but I use Python like a goddamned moron in that I still don't know how to use virutalenv/venv to do proper dev isolation. And from the brief research I did, I see that Anaconda has its own conventions, or work flow...something with the conda utility. Again, I can see why it's necessary for Anaconda's use case (people who want to do data science and not hand-tweak their environment every time they upgrade a package over pip), but it added too many layers for me at the time.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/continuum.io/forum/#!topic/anaco...