That's not a Bundler fail, that's a gem packaging fail.

Yes and no. Yes, the problem is heightened by people specifying version patterns when they probably don't have to.

However, when you get a bundle install conflict error about json, one gem needing a higher version, and one needing a lower version... adding json to _my_ Gemfile/gemspec to fix it when I'm not using json directly is also not the right answer. Sometimes, even that doesn't work at all.

Still not Bundler's fault -- it can't install both versions. At any rate, versioning is a hard problem.

Even if you could install both, it would not fix anything since only one version can be loaded.

That's not why this is a shame. This is a shame because given the same Gemfile, bundler and rubygems do different things.