Pipenv is pretty nice, I still use it. Kenneth Reitz really has a knack for interfaces and making things easier for developers to use.
The fiasco was that he was not the best at maintaining projects, and used his popularity from tablib and requests to get pipenv recommended by the PyPA well before it was ready for general use. Then around the same time there was a few scandals I don't remember the details of, something about a developer being mad that Kenneth kept the money being donated to requests. It ended up with all of his popular projects being maintained by others.
I wish the response from the PyPA was to go full in on pipenv and just keep improving it at the same rate it was in the beginning. Instead it stagnated.
Poetry came out fragmenting the ecosystem even more. And quite a few developers gave up on virtual environments in favor of docker.
pipenv started having regular releases again and have kept it going for the past few years. I like it enough to not want to put any effort into switching, but in 2017/2018 it really felt like the next big thing. It makes me sad to think that we all lost out because of politics.
Ugh I remember the dependency problems. I think we worked around it by explicitly installing dependencies first. We did almost switch to poetry because of that, but it came down to "everyone is busy, lets just see how often it is a problem". Luckily we didn't run into it too many times, and they have since fixed it.
