Hey @peterjc!
I wanted to circle back to this topic to let you know that we're moving to python 3.10 in our upcoming release (2024.10) and as of this morning, we have development builds available for all three of our supported QIIME 2 distributions that are on python 3.10. We didn't have to bump any of our major dependencies like we did from 3.8 to 3.9 (pandas, skbio, etc) so this transition should be much smoother for you (if you're aiming to stay up to date with our latest python version). You can install/play around with these dev builds here:
https://develop.qiime2.org/en/latest/plugins/how-to-guides/set-up-development-environment.html#set-up-your-development-environment
Just make sure you're installing your preferred distribution (tiny, amplicon, etc). Let me know if you have any questions!