You raise good and valid points here. I particularly like the integrate Rhino’s geometry into python’s community part. I like to add a few thoughts here with the hope that this will bring a bit more clarity to the decisions made on scripting in Rhino:
Brining Rhino Geometry to Python Devs: There does not exist a single solution that works for everyone. I agree that bringing Rhino geometry to python users is an incredibly powerful approach. But we can also get the same feedback from dotnet developers that want to use newer C# language versions and dotnet runtimes. We can throw other tools like Revit in this mix as well since just like python and C#, they are also environments that Rhino geometry can be useful in.
Rhino.Inside project is a great framework that satisfies the use cases listed above and more. It works inside standalone python 3 and dotnet programs as well as any other application that is willing to load Rhino using this framework into its process and use the geometry engine and plugin ecosystem that Rhino and Grasshopper are famous for.
Although the python library has been created a while ago, as @scottd shared an example of using this library in python above, it is still working in the latest python 3.13
Bringing Python to Rhino Users: Not everyone is comfortable creating python virtual environments and projects in vscode or other IDEs. For this reason having an easily-accessible script editor inside of Rhino and especially Grasshopper is necessary. They make scripting more approachable to Rhino users. ScriptEditor in Rhino 8, takes care of installing and preparing a python 3 environment inside of Rhino very easy. I know that it is not the best and greatest python 3 out there, but it does work and it does bring the power of scientific packages like numpy and pytorch inside of Rhino. This works for a lot of Rhino users. Embedded script editor also benefits from running in the same memory, is able to access just about anything in Rhino, and is acutely aware that it is inside of Rhino so it can provide Rhino/Grasshopper-specific features.
Support
I am one of the primary script-editing developers at McNeel and you probably have seen me discussing python and scripting on the forum in the past years.
I understand that you feel the rhinoinside python package is ‘abandoned’. I would love to head about any bugs or errors that you are seeing that stops you from using any of these libraries, or the script editor inside of Rhino. You can always directly tag me on any of related issues.