Yeah, I've been thinking about how I'd do it from scratch, honestly. (One of the reasons Pytest could catch on is that it supported standard library `unittest` classes, and still does. But the standard library option is already ugly as sin, being essentially an ancient port of JUnit.)

I think it's not so much that Pytest is using obscure language features (decorators are cool and the obvious choice for a lot of this kind of stuff) but that it wants too much magic to happen in terms of how the "fixtures" automatically connect together. I would think that "Explicit is better than implicit" and "Simple is better than complex" go double for tests. But things like `pytest.mark.parametrize` are extremely useful.