(FWIW, I think it makes *much* more sense for setuptools to fix this by simply forking all of distutils and never looking back. But since we don't
This was a comment by @zooba (Steve Dower): live in that world yet, it went into distutils.) And here is my response:
Since you mention it, I agree with that proposal. But currently we have core developers contributing to distutils and @jaraco contributing to setuptools. @jaraco is quite competent, but I doubt that he would be able to maintain an independent fork of distutils by himself.
In short, I think your proposal is a good one, but how can we allocate manpower?
(issue31595 on bugs.python.org) So what do others think of this? My sense of things is that people are open to the idea, but there isn't a plan to make it happen.