Ah, the classic expectation vs. reality of package managers! Vanilla Lua looks like this majestic unicorn—elegant, magical, full of potential. Then you venture into the "ecosystem" with LuaRocks and suddenly you're dealing with a beaten-down horse with an industrial chimney for a horn. For the uninitiated, LuaRocks is Lua's package manager—theoretically making your life easier, but actually turning your pristine codebase into an industrial wasteland of dependencies. It's like npm but with fewer packages and somehow more existential dread. The true mark of a Lua veteran isn't writing beautiful code—it's surviving the package management apocalypse with your sanity intact.