Asking out of curiosity, not to insinuate that "you were holding it wrong". The docs at https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/user_guide/#resolver-changes-2... say:

> If you don’t want pip to actually resolve dependencies, use the --no-deps option. This is useful when you have a set of package versions that work together in reality, even though their metadata says that they conflict. For guidance on a long-term fix, read Dealing with dependency conflicts.

Did that not work?