No, as you probably guessed, it's needed by a number of apps. After two days, I managed to download it, but these were the first two days after the new firmware was released, so the servers were being hammered.

My suggestion, which is simply one passed on from others here in the forums: Try disabling all your repositories except for the one (forgive, I can't recall which one it is right now) that contains Python. At the very least, it reduces the number amount of time it takes for the app manager to 'load' so when it fails, you can loop thru the download cycle faster.

That seemed to work for me during the recent 'repo madness' which, btw, I thought had subsided...alas