If you're actually interested in this and you look at how universal locks are done (important because Pants uses these exclusively) and you consider Pip's point of view and all that, really page the problem set in, I think you might come to the conclusion I have, Pex likely needs to move to resolvelib instead of Pip + hacks in the long term. If so, that's a better place to put effort than continued hacks.

not clear on why the use of

--report

is a hack, but the resolvelib usage is interesting because i was also encouraged to look at doing further work on caching in the pip resolver as a plugin to resolvelib

I honestly don't know the answer, but that's the true magic thing Pex does here. Locking was easy, universal took all the work.