Yes, it is. Coming to this mess from the joy of bundler/gems, npm, or hell, even CPAN will ruin your afternoon.

It is just an unfortunate circumstance of the community not efficiently converging on well designed standards quickly enough, and so, the rocky soil has sprouted strange twisty crops. There are articles on how the setuptools/distutils frankenhack pretty much set off the whole trainwreck that you see today, e.g.: http://blog.startifact.com/posts/older/a-history-of-python-p...

Armin (the OP) has also written about this sad history previously: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2012/6/22/hate-hate-hate-everywhere/