The GEO-ICT installation instructions look fine to me, but some users find it tricky to ensure that Python always uses the “snap” environment. Anaconda environments are very useful when you plan to install other tools available via conda, but if you don’t need those, Python 2.7 or 3.6 (the “active” releases from python.org) should be easier to manage.
Where did the GEO-ICT setup fail for you?
I’m sorry you lost so much time – unless you already use a JDK, Eclipse, maven, and C++ and have special requirements, it is much better to stick with a basic configuration that is widely used so others will be able to help with problems. Visual Studio brings in its own Python support but installs Python in the user’s Appdata folder with a long complicated path that makes it tricky to use with snappy. It is also best to use the same Java runtime for both SNAP and snappy so you don’t have to worry about Java differences when things don’t work as expected.
SNAP includes jpy for 64-bit Windows 10 with Python 2.7 or 3.6. Snappy on Windows 10 works well using Oracle Java 1.8 and Python 2.7 or Python 3.6 from Python.org installed to C:\Python-N.N following Configure Python to use the SNAP-Python snappy interface.
The above configuration instructions include a simple test to ensure the configuration is working, and offers several ways to ensure that python can find snappy. I recommend the “generic” method based on USERPROFILE because it works for any system that installed snappy when SNAP was installed, so make it easier to share Python scripts (the same method also works in linux using HOME instead of USERPROFILE). If you have multiple Python versions and try to install snappy into your desired Python installation, be careful to check it actually ends up in the right place.