Pip is fine, it depends on your goals. I've found requirements.txt less enjoyable to maintain for several reasons – you need to separate dev, test dependencies on your own time, there's no notion of a lockfile for transitive dependencies (`pip freeze` notably doesn't separate actual dependencies from transitive dependencies). pip is also darn slow at installing dependencies once you hit a certain scale, and poetry outperforms it pretty substantially.

Poetry does I expect a package manager to do, and does it well, especially when working with a team of developers on an application versus individually. There's not a compelling reason for me to use pip directly as a less functional alternative.

Good question! From a template repo commit at work[1]:

Advantages:

- Separates development and production dependencies.

- The dependency version is specified separately from the lock file. In practice this means that the version in pyproject.toml generally only needs to be set to anything other than asterisk if and when it becomes necessary to use a specific version range.

- The lock file includes SHA-256 checksums by default, and these are checked during installation.

Disadvantages:

- More complex configuration than Pip.

- Python package managers come and go, and this one is likely going to suffer the same fate eventually.

- Introduces poetry.toml simply to specify that the virtualenv should be in the project directory. The default is to put virtualenvs in ~/.poetry, which is a non-standard location and therefore might interfere with typical IDE setups, mounting the virtualenv in containers or VMs, and the like.

[1] https://github.com/linz/template-python-hello-world/pull/106...*