This puts me in mind of a post I made in @BrenBarn’s “10 year view” thread–the idea that more-generic packaging tools (like conda/mamba) could delegate installation to more specific tools like pip.
Maybe what I’m trying to say is: as part of building such a proof-of-concept (or maybe in place of it), it would be neat to see if a) conda-forge could replace many recipes with a delegation to pip and b) then could expose those automatically built wheels as an extra index. Or, if those aren’t possible, figure out the blockers.