The main motivator for the redirector was to support the Store package, which can only be *executed* from outside its container (we can't load the DLL directly). Given we want the two distributions to be interchangeable from a code POV, it made the most sense to switch both over. That said, there were other issues with the previous system that were worth fixing, it just happens that a new one was introduced (though it definitely already existed for some users - IPC is a complex pattern to get right even when you fully control the processes).

I still haven't been able to come up with a viable workaround that doesn't break more cases than it helps. Passing the internal environment variable around might help, but I don't want to fully support it because then that would prevent us fixing this properly!

PEP 582 (or otherwise getting away from virtual environments in favour of some other way of having project-specific package installation) may be our best hope.