It is a mess though, and quite incapable.

Agreed. winget is lacking most features I absolutely need from a package manager, including listing installed packages, uninstalling packages, and updating packages. These are all on the v1 roadmap [1], but for the foreseeable future I'm sticking with scoop.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/blob/master/doc/wind...

But what package list does it have? That’s the primary criteria. A package manager with no package isn’t of much use.