> As a footnote, Python does package management much better than alternatives
No offense meant, but that sounds like the assessment of someone that has only experienced really shitty package management systems. PyPI has had their XMLRPC search interface disabled for months (a year?) now, so you can't even easily figure out what to install from the shell and have to use other tools/a browser to figure it out.
Ultimately, I'm moving towards thinking that most scripting languages actually make for fairly poor systems and admin languages. It used to be the ease of development made all the other problems moot, but there's been large advances in compiled language usability.
For scripting languages you're either going to follow the path or Perl or the the path of Python, and they both have their problems. For Perl, you get amazing stability at the expense of eventually the language dying out because there's not enough new features to keep people interested.
For Python, the new features mean that module writers want to use them, and then they do, and you'll find that the system Python you have can't handle what modules need for things you want to install, and so you're forced to not just have a separate module environment, but fully separate pythons installed on servers so you cane make use of the module ecosystem. For a specific app you're shipping around this is fine, but when maintaining a fleet of servers and trying to provide a consistent environment, this is a big PITA that you don't want to deal with when you've already chosen a major LTS distro to avoid problems like this.
Compiling a scripting language usually doesn't help much either, as that usually results in extremely bloated binaries which have their own packaging and consistency problems.
This is cyclical problem we've had so far. A language is used for admin and system work, the requirements of administrators grate up against the usage needs of people that use the language for other things, and it fails for non-admin work and loses popularity and gets replaced be something more popular (Perl -> Python) or it fails for admin work because it caters to other uses and eventually gets replaced by something more stable (what I think will happen to Python, what I think somewhat happened to bash earlier for slightly different reasons).
I'm not a huge fan of Go, but I can definitely see why people switch to it for systems work. It alleviates a decent chunk of the consistency problems, so it's at least better in that respect.