Firstly, thank you for the great documentation on getting up to speed on developing for scipy. The development tooling has also matured, and it is significantly easier to get started today than when I first contributed to the project.
I got confused when the current developer documentation seemed to not work when setting up an environment. For example python dev.py no longer works. I found the page using a quick Internet search. It is obvious in hind sight that I should have been using the developer documentation.
Maybe the solution is that I need to change my habits. However, it may be useful to consider how the documentation could point users to use the development version instead to reduce friction for new or infrequent contributors. For developer documentation, it is more likely that the released version documentation is not relevant.