I am employed by the Python Software Foundation as Director of Infrastructure, PyPI is a small portion of what I spend my time on and my focus is primarily on the operations/upkeep. Mike Fiedler is employed by the Python Software Foundation as PyPI Safety and Security Engineer and his primary focus is improvements to security for PyPI. Donald and Dustin are volunteers.
In this case, yes there should be paid support staff for PyPI to do this work. But there are not as such. Neither of the paid staff are focused even part time on support. Ultimately our capacity for support is prioritized based on urgency as follows:
- Security and Malware
- Production incidents
- Maintenance
- Basic user-support
- Account Recovery
- 541/name requests
Even if (once?) we had paid support, 541/name requests would remain lowest priority as there is always the self-service option of “choose another name”.