Second, the creators of the language didn't bother thinking about how people are supposed to ship software when they were dreaming up the language. Languages are cool, maintenance and support aren't.

I'm not even saying my pet language is immune, I don't know that I'd use Ruby tooling that didn't have OS packaging if I didn't have deep knowledge of Ruby. I plan on figuring out just enough of python to be able to use python tooling, but I think it's super-stupid that no one thinks of that use case and so requires that everyone has expertise before they can use at a basic level. Should I have python 2 or 3 installed on my machine? Why can't I have both and have the language just choose and default sanely? Python seems to be utterly stupid in this regard.

Stupid, but that's the world as it is right now. I single out python because there's more devs writing more interesting python projects that are totally useless to anyone who isn't a python dev than any other lang. Also then again, Ruby devs/teams who do make tools for broader consumption usually package their stuff up because everybody knows Ruby tooling is total shit. Python devs don't seem to have this awareness of this limitation of their ecosystem, beaten in myopia only by the juggernaut of uselessness that is the nodejs ecosystem.

Then again is ruby really that bad? Everybody knows you have to use a ruby version manager, you can't get very far at all in Ruby without one. I don't think they're really all that hard for an even mediocre dev to instrument. Is it really worth setting up virtualenv or whatever the heck pythonistas are using for env management these days for basic usage of a project written in python? How much of it do I have to know? Is it going to bite me in the ass one day like nodejs does just about every time I have to deal with it? Questions I don't want to deal with, so I strongly consider rewriting python tools in ruby at a bare minimum level because I don't want to take the time to ship personal tooling.