I think you are confusing "missing a requirement" with "not prioritizing a few other people's requirements". That pip is missing this feature has always been documented, I always knew it was a missing requirement, but I did not have any personal motivation to resolve that.
Pip is great for many many use cases, but I think it kind of get overhyped as a replacement for easy_install. People just get upset when they encounter situation where it doesn't live up to the hype.
What hype? pip can uninstall packages. This is a very hard feature to live without for everyone. Binary eggs seem to have a devoted following but are not a universal need.
> This is a very hard feature to live without for everyone.
I never ever uninstalled a package since I started using virtualenv. I always just trash the venv every once in a while and recreate it from a requirements.txt.
