Short version of the above: I personally think we should be focusing on addressing the "system Python" and "Python as a library" cases upstream, as we're the only ones that can do that.

Solving the latter problem well then also sets the baseline for user focused installations, as those are then just a case of installing upstream CPython as if you were going to embed it in a larger application, and then just using it instead of embedding it.

For user focused cases, a good end user oriented solution will often bring in additional libraries targeted towards relevant problem domains. ActiveState does do that for Windows by bringing in additional modules like pywin32 and various others, but (as far as I am aware) we don't have anyone from there active on distutils-sig the way we do with Enthought, Continuum Analytics & the Linux distros. Assuming they have a booth at PyCon next month, I should probably swing by and ask the Komodo IDE folks about that...