I have to wonder if you're doing it wrong. We have a very large angular/node app, which has been in production for 2.5 years, with many packages. We npm-install several times per day on different networks and different machines. The only time we have had problems is when the actual npm site itself goes down (thankfully that's rare now but it was annoyingly frequent "in the beginning"). Npm-shrinkwrap is a little painful but gets the job done. I don't hear a lot of people having problems with npm. It kind of "just works" for almost everyone.
Don't get me wrong, we are lucky to have npm at all and I don't want to turn this thread into a vendetta for "my issue" because I hate when people do that but I've obviously struck a chord with the community. I don't think it's just me.
Maybe npm is broken and everyone is either just apologizing for it or complaining instead of fixing it (myself included).
