SlicerSOFA will fail to load when an installation of SOFA is present in the system. This behaviour has been captured on MS Windows (maybe other OS are also affected). The problem is caused by the way we set the paths when loading SlicerSOFA. Particularly on the following lines:
sys.path.append(script_dir + '/../../../../plugins/SofaPython3/lib/python3/site-packages')
sys.path.append(script_dir + '/../../../../plugins/STLIB/lib/python3/site-packages')
With this code, existing sofa paths will be preceding, thus causing the problem (this was reported by @DomenicoRiggio during ProjectWeek 42nd (https://projectweek.na-mic.org/PW42_2025_GranCanaria/). A solution to this problem is prepending the new SlicerSOFA paths, instead of appending them.