I have to say, at first blush I would not choose click over argparse. I do have to look up the docs of argparse every time I use it, but I like that it's just gives me the args and lets me structure the program flow how I want to, which I think is more natural.

And then I can do things like import a big package (pandas) only after parsing the args, which is highly convenient to users that want to check the argument options without a five second lag.

-- it's probably not the most flexible tool, but IMHO it's the one with the best API: fire.Fire(obj) and everything else is taken care of ;)

p.s.: for lazy imports, just don't put them in the top of your module in the entry point.