I gave a talk about this at the Packaging Summit during Pycon which was well received, so the team is definitely aware of the problem.

However, the sense I got was that it was going to be a lot of work to “fix Python packaging” which wasn't feasible with an all-volunteer group.

At work, we're migrating away from pip as a distribution mechanism for this reason; I don't expect to see meaningful improvements to the developer experience anytime soon.

This is especially true because pip today is roughly where npm was in 2015, so there's a lot of fundamental infrastructure work (including security) that still needs to happen. An example of this is that PyPI just got the ability to namespace packages.