> having to remember where they were, what their names were, and what was installed into each one was a pain point for me.

It's at the project root, it's named 'venv', and its contents are described by requirements.txt.

> You're saying you see people complain about it a lot - therefore it's a genuine problem.

Debatable as a principle, but applicable enough here I suppose. Still, I'm not saying the problems aren't real, but what I (and probably most of us virtualenv users) are saying is that there's a pretty broad swathe of projects where you don't encounter them. It's just fine. You install your packages and use your packages and that's the whole story.

I guess if you have a hard dependency on a particular version of python, it's going to be harder, but... why? That's already niche in my book. If you're saying the AWS repo was pinned to a particular version of python, I'm going to blame that on Amazon frankly. That's definitely bizarre.

Edit: Were you looking at this? https://github.com/boto/boto3 Definitely more complicated than a typical greenfield virtualenv-able project, with some python version restrictions.