Sounds a bit cherry-picky/anecdotal to me: I regularly build open source projects using multiple versions of VS, and have created some, and it either works out of the box (because the project maintainers spent time on it - both on project system and on portable code) or else at least doesn't take weeks. Likewise on linux/mac: building from source usually works. But also not always (it is better than in 1995 though, where I'd spend hours figuring out exactly which dependency still needed building and hoping I'd find the correct patch etc. Things seem more unified now, at least to me). Also since VS2013 (possibly VS2012 as well, don't have that anymore to test) you can actually have one single project file for any version up to the latest since they all use the same format.
Don't get me wrong: configure/make is way more mature but you almost make it sound like nothing works at all with VS/msbuild which is imo often just because people don't really know how to work with it (which in turn might be because of lack of documentation/proper examples/...), or because project maintainers don't care for VS support, and/or because there is no standard dependency managment (yet? cmake does a pretty good job, vcpkg looks promising).
such as python
Wasn't that just 'msbuild path/to/python.sln'? At least for the core, might be different for other modules. But I definitely remember getting a working python.exe just by building the supplied project files.
Don't get me wrong: configure/make is way more mature but you almost make it sound like nothing works at all with VS/msbuild which is imo often just because people don't really know how to work with it (which in turn might be because of lack of documentation/proper examples/...), or because project maintainers don't care for VS support, and/or because there is no standard dependency managment (yet? cmake does a pretty good job, vcpkg looks promising).
such as python
Wasn't that just 'msbuild path/to/python.sln'? At least for the core, might be different for other modules. But I definitely remember getting a working python.exe just by building the supplied project files.