It would appear that on python versions 3.12 and above, where distutils is fully discontinued, loading the required packages (namely smccomponenets) which uses mpi4py to load something, which requires 'distutils.msvc9compiler'.

So the issue lies with mpi4py I believe for not migrating to setuptools entirely? and the only workaround until they fix that it seems is just to use python versions that are below 3.12?

For example, below is a screenshot of the error when using python 3.13.3: