Well, perhaps the usual suspects can get another infoworld self-promotion article out of it.
In these decisions the only thing that matters is if Microsoft, Facebook, Bloomberg or one of their employees is pleased.
Yes; it's extremely cruft-filled and nobody wanted to / had the skills to keep the standard library version maintained. There's a note in the Setuptools documentation somewhere about how distutils was deemed fundamentally unfixable, and it doesn't come across like the hacks Setuptools was applying on top of distutils were particularly well understood by anyone.
>In these decisions the only thing that matters is if Microsoft, Facebook, Bloomberg or one of their employees is pleased.
I don't think there's good evidence for this, and the current case is certainly not convincing. Why would they want distutils removed - as opposed to that motivation come from the devs who would otherwise be responsible for its bugs?