Apologies for the delay! The reason for the manual copy down has been because of restriction policies like the internet, but then when we have tried to build some sort of tool for it, it becomes quite messy to maintain and manage over time - some developers started to add 'features' that were specific for their project but not for the wider company and it gets out of control the wider the usage across the company... at least from my experience.
One core problem for me too is the package management anyway, what we want is to have a gateway to ensure that we can run a scan and control the packages coming into use by developers, again this is where Anaconda is too unrestricted for us because any dev can pickup a package, put it into a channel and then it becomes available to a wider audience which is not ideal.
Yes for "drop in value" correct, it would save us a considerable amount of time. Not only do we have to deal with 100's to 1000's of packages, but we also have multiple versions of Python and different applications running on different versions. Additionally we have internally built packages (which sometimes are sensitive to a particular team or we need to run a black duck test on it) and these are made available to a wider audience.
Consolidating these common package management issues into Proget would streamline the operations and save us a generally big headache on a day to day basis.
The value of the conda index command being automated with new packages (approved) to be used by teams automatically makes a big difference.
On the market there are a couple of other products, but its very difficult to use a tool per language, especially where we have in my team cross-training between languages that they have to use a different tool.
Apologies for a partial rant on this, my last comment would be that we have seen a huge swing towards Python development in the last few years and the tooling in this space is very different to .NET for example (in my view worse) and would be a big string to the bow of Proget if it supported it too.