> an excellent reason not to use it
You're really missing my argument here.
>> there's something cheaper than storage: infrequently scanning the system!
The solution already exists
If required python version does not exist, download.
This is already being done. The missing part is the scanning of the system. I need to make this abundantly clear: You do not need to rely on Apple for this to be a solution. Furthermore, even if Apple completely removes python, making this change would still improve brew and reduce bloat. This is why I didn't care about that comment. Because it is inconsequential to what I'm suggesting. If they remove python you're in the exact same position as not having the right version of python. It is equivalent. I'm not sure why you're harping on this.
> My `uv python list` shows
You're again missing the point. It isn't about having different versions, hell I got 3.13, 3.12, 3.11, 3.10, 3.9, and 3.8 on my system. The problem is having redundant copies of the minor (or even patch) versions. When I installed `uv` I uninstalled brew, purged everything, and reinstalled. This is because when I'm creating a new venv it isn't actually `uv` that is installing a new python version, it is linking one that was installed by brew. When I was using Anaconda, conda didn't search for existing versions (and packages), it just installed its own. You might be thinking this isn't a problem with brew and a problem with conda, but that's passing the buck. Brew is making the same error that conda was and thinking brew is better and that the solution should be fixed by others is just idiotic. Its blaming those downstream for a problem that's being created. If a "crime" is a "crime" then it doesn't matter who does it.
We're getting off topic now, since this is besides the point. But hey, here's a few things that can help look at the system and what's happening.
On my system, brew installed 3.13, 3.12, and 3.11 (you can guess when I purged). For good measure, try this instead
brew list | xargs -P8 -n1 sh -c 'brew cat "${0}" | grep "depends_on \"python@3." | sed -e "s/.*\(python@3\.[0-9]*\).*/\1/g"' 2> /dev/null | sort -u
This will go through all your brew packages and find the python depends. My output shows 3.11 and 3.12. Interestingly, no python 3.13, though brew installed this. Interesting considering brew and brew-core don't have python code (according to github). Maybe something installed it and then I removed it. I'm unsure. But let's edit our command and check only those python@3.11 instances.
brew list | xargs -P8 -n1 sh -c 'brew cat "${0}" | grep "depends_on \"python@3.11" &> /dev/null && echo "${0}"' 2> /dev/null
I checked the formulas on github, none of those even have python 3.11 anymore. These are cryptography, libxml2, numpy, py3parser, py3cairo, python-cryptography, pygobjects3, and python-packaging. With the exception of python-cryptography and python-packaging (no GitHub formula), the brew formula on GitHub depends on both 3.12 and 3.13 for every one of these. There is no dep for 3.11! Did a `brew update` and `brew upgrade` and they're still 3.11. But hey, now the first brew list command reports 3.11, 3.12, and 3.13. Doing `brew info python-cryptography` there's a green checkmark on `python@3.12` and `python@3.13` (`python@3.11` is not shown), while `python-setuptools` has a red x despite the fact that I have setuptools installed in both 3.13 and 3.12 in different uv environments (it also isn't finding rust). So it certainly isn't finding packages and trying to reduce redundancy which is the big problem `uv` tries to solve in the first place.