I think a lot of this has to do with just how bad/incomplete the docs are, how unnecessarily janky the shell integration is, and how the Anaconda launcher itself makes a huge mess and actively works against best practices.
The docs for building your own packages are even worse, to the point where you basically are left copying snippets from Conda Forge to build anything nontrivial.
Basically Conda is a tremendous engineering achievement, but it's very much still a "first draft" in a lot of ways, and Continuum/Anaconda made some weird decisions that work against its user-friendliness. Imagine for example if third-party repos on anaconda.org could have a description box, link to a homepage, etc...
The docs for building your own packages are even worse, to the point where you basically are left copying snippets from Conda Forge to build anything nontrivial.
Basically Conda is a tremendous engineering achievement, but it's very much still a "first draft" in a lot of ways, and Continuum/Anaconda made some weird decisions that work against its user-friendliness. Imagine for example if third-party repos on anaconda.org could have a description box, link to a homepage, etc...