Namespaces for the Python Package Index

30 years of Linux distributions should have thoroughly debunked this mantra; and that's a limited, heavily gated pool of components. Once you open it to a whole ecosystem and minimise the friction towards publishing, you have the perfect recipe for a disaster.

Very, very few people sign up for curating the wild west, and you can only get so far with minimal volunteer resources.

The idea of a flat namespace in which everyone plays nice and nobody squats on a name they just reserved for a rainy day project that never comes is naive at best; it's like thinking that the Internet is still the same as it was in the '90s.

> I shouldn't need to buy a whole domain for a hobby project (and I am far more likely to do a hobby project in Python than in Java)

That would have been a problem before GitHub/GitLab/source hosting services; you can use a reverse domain like com.github.yourusername.yourproject, and satisfy the requirements for a domain. If the verification process is automated, and based on something like a token held in a file accessible via a well-known URL, then you can publish it using something like GitHub or GitLab pages, which both reflect your user name as the namespace.