No offense, but where on earth did you get that impression from? I have a feeling whoever told you that has either never used npm with a non-trivial project or was messing with you.
I've had more issues with npm in the last month than I've had with pip, gem, and apt combined over the last two years. "most unreliable package manager" is an apt descriptor.
If you've used it for anything non-trivial, then you probably should've been using a private registry - in which case you get the decentralized benefits of npm sans npmjs.org availability issues.
Is the issue just that npmjs.org is frequently unavailable? Surely any serious project will have their own mirror of NPM, PyPI, apt, yum, etc so they are not relying on third party servers they don't control to be able to do a build/deploy/whatever.
None taken. I got the impression from comments on HN and elsewhere. To be fair, those comments might've been from Node advocates, so they could've been skewed. Is one of the (main) problems that the registry is often unavailable?
I've had more issues with npm in the last month than I've had with pip, gem, and apt combined over the last two years. "most unreliable package manager" is an apt descriptor.