​A waste of time? No. But it sure is poor investment of time for newbie users. It's a futile struggle to document (or read about) all the features of distutils and setuptools, not because it can't be documented, but because there's too much ground to cover and PyPA's packaging.python.org approach is to ​just give an overview of what's available and avoid giving any real best practice recommendations as much as possible. There may be good reasons for that but that's not a sensible approach to giving users a "pitfall free" learning path.