Thank you both for the helpful replies. While relative imports are useful to me, personally, I probably mistitled my question. I think I'm looking for the equivalent of what PyCharm calls "source root." (ref)

Basically, I'm hoping to skip that extra server from the import mentioned in the original question. I'm guessing the answer is still the same though as far as it being possible? But I'm curious if it influences how @bagel897 feels about it philosophically. The root of each "project" is just a bit lower in the directory tree than where the LSP is counting as its root.

So, IIUC, you're actually just trying to set the rope's project root to be different than your Git/VCS project's root. That should be fairly straightforward then, you just need to set the project root as appropriate. How to do this is editor-specific, in neovim's built in LSP, you can set the root_dir.

This seems more like an neovim lsp question on how to configure root_dir, rather than pylsp/rope in particular.

Yes, I think that's a decent summary. Though, I had wondered/hoped that I could somehow control the "import root" without affecting the LSP root directory. Ideally, I wouldn't run a separate LSP per project since they do all, in fact, share the same .venv and pyproject.toml.

Since rope has source_folders and python_path as config options, I didn't know if that could somehow influence the upper limit of the import. Perhaps our project is a little non-standard. But as far as I can tell, all other tooling works for us when we set PYTHONPATH=server or PYTHONPATH=worker where worker and server are subdirectories.

Actually, I typed the above and re-checked, and it seems that if I set prefs["python_path"] = ["server", "~/projects/myco/.venv/lib/python3.11/site-packages"] I get the import statement I wanted.

I really appreciate the responses and your opening of the ticket. I still see value in support of relative imports for rope/pylsp, but being able to control the "root" is what I was after so I'll mark this as answered.

@lieryan Marked my own answer, just because I wanted to leave a summary for future readers. Please let me know if that misleads other users of the library. I'm happy to discuss further, but don't wish to take any more of your time. Thanks again for all the help!

@jaycle thank you for writing how you solved the issue! That's really great.