No clear winner when npm has more dots than all of the others? What's the point in even comparing them, then?

I think npm's approach is pretty cool -- it sacrifices disk space for portability (package dependencies are always installed in the node_packages directory of the package root), so while you might effectively have 3 or 4 of the same coffee-script folder in your install, you don't have to worry about virtual environments for development and you don't have to worry about dependency upgrades breaking some other package. I think the nature of javascript allows this to be effective considering that many dependencies are smallish snippets of code.