So I have been doing Python for far too long and have all sort of tooling I've accreted to make Python work well for me across projects and computers and I never quite made the leap to Poetry and was suspicious of uv.

Happened to buy a new machine and decided to jump in the deep end and it's been glorious. I think the difference from your comment (and others in this chain) and my experience is that you're trying to make uv fit how you have done things. Jumping all the way in, I just . . . never needed virtualenvs. Don't really think about them once I sorted out a mistake I was making. uv init and you're pretty much there.

>You end up needing to use `uv pip` so it's not even a full replacement for pip

The only time I've used uv pip is on a project at work that isn't a uv-powered project. uv add should be doing what you need and it really fights you if you're trying to add something to global because it assumes that's an accident, which it probably is (but you can drop back to uv pip for that).

>`UV_TOOL_BIN_DIR`, `UV_SYSTEM_PYTHON`, `UV_LINK_MODE`, etc.

I've been using it for six months and didn't know those existed. I would suggest this is a symptom of trying to make it be what you're used to. I would also gently suggest those of us who have decades of Python experience may have a bit of Stockholm Syndrome around package management, packaging, etc.