FWIW, @Kwpolska , while much of the first few sections reads as a opinionated but not unfair summary of your perspective of view on the year’s events and many of the dynamics that played out, for good or ill, at one point it takes a sharp turn into borderline conspiratorial territory, which I wanted to address:
Some people tried finding solutions, some people shared their opinions… and then the Discourse moderator decided to protect his PyPA friends from having to read user feedback and locked the thread.
In the interests of full disclosure, I’m a Python (and Spyder) core dev, PEP editor, Discourse mod, docs team member, and volunteer packaging standards and docs contributor, but not a PyPA member, so I cannot speak with absolute authority on this. However, to my knowledge, the particular volunteer moderator involved has no particular connections to the PyPA, PyPUG or any PyPA project (nor, in fact, to the Python team); in fact, while they maintain a number of open source projects, the only packaging-related involvement I see listed on their GitHub profile as of the past year are with PDM.
For the record, I agree with most of the points raised in the final message and found them well-stated (as did numerous others in the community, at least judging from the high number of “likes” on the post). On he other hand, as far as locking the thread is concerned I personally didn’t agree that was either necessary or beneficial, unless there was disruptive or CoC-violating behavior, and in several recent threads a fair few prominent PyPI members have in expressed the viewpoint that threads shouldn’t be locked in cases such as this.
Therefore, I see no basis in fact for the allegation that the thread lock was due to improper collusion, nepotism or conflict of interest on the part of the moderator involved, as opposed to simply being consistent with a third party’s well-established personal moderation style.