There is something deep about software that thwarts our dreams of making it re-usable, and makes debates about what primitives to put into the stdlib difficult. For one thing, it seems like we should be able to collectively determine a DAG of concepts, starting from simplest primitives and progressively building up derived concepts, like the tech tree in a game like Civilization, or Principia Mathematica. But that tree is so vast, and the most-useful points so sparse along it (ex: I don't think anyone's asking for Church numerals in their stdlib) that we end up debating which are the most-useful derived concepts to surface. Moreover, there's no language or compiler that is sufficiently smart to efficiently map all those concepts to the hardware we have, we instead go with expertly-wrought implementations.

To take this example, you _could_ count enumerations and permutations by passing a range(n) list to itertools and then counting how many actual results you get back, but that's silly when you could also just use the binomial theorem to get there directly. A compiler that could generally perform such transformations would be miraculous -- well beyond the territory of automated proof assistants like mathematica or gcc -O3 that trundle along cultivated routes of expert system rules, into the realm of actually discovering deep linkages at the frontier of our knowledge.

Until then it seems like stdlibs will just fracture along lines of strain among the userbase. Presumably, most Python users don't need anything beyond what a financial calculator would provide, and anyone else should head to numpy.