In general, I do try very much to think about this from the user perspective. It’s just that there are many types of users with different perspectives! You’re optimising for your own type - mid-level programmer wanting minimal install (on Py3.10?). Some of the actions you suggest work for all types (e.g. the docs were incorrect, which I’ll fix today) but others improve your experience at a cost to others (e.g. moving to the lean core distribution) and then we have to work out which is best for most users
To answer some specific Qs:
That’s a tricky one, but could be interesting to work on. Should have some sort of validating code, presumably, that to make sure it’s currently accurate. It’s the sort of thing that could easily slip out of date
The conda installation was contributed by users that wanted it but I think they’re not using PsychoPy these days or haven’t got around to updating it. Also they had to use some workarounds for a couple of packages that were hard to get into the conda ecosphere or were incompatible with other parts of conda packaging.
This might have been due to an issue that was recently fixed in our setup.cfg where conflicting versions of python-vlc were being requested. It’s now fixed in the release branch so hopefully the next release will work better for this (2022.1.3 which is imminent)
This is an interesting approach and might also be used to solve the issue of minimalist users versus those that prefer omnibus packages. pip install psychopy could be omnibus as now, and pip install psychopy-release could be the minimalist installer