It's important to realize that the outermost dir is not generally the dir containing the package. In other words, the outermost dir is usually the dir that contains the project files, which also includes the package dir itself.

So for instance you might have some necessary build utilities, such as setup.py, a README, perhaps some tests, as well as a dir containing the actual package. Thought of like this, there's no actual redundancy, but it definitely is confusing until you make that connection.

Here's a simple example:

  project/
    README
    setup.py
    test_project.py
    project/
       __init__.py
       project.py

Here project/project/ is the actual package, everything above that dir is simply ancillary to the actual package itself.