there is a very real sense in which nix has been riding on a good idea while ergonomics elsewhere in the field have advanced, yes. make no mistake, the technical work, getting programs to behave themselves in a fairly alien environment etc, has been impressive, but it's like in the marathon to get there, the idea of making that process somewhat nicer has been subject to constant procrastination. which sucks since in some sense the lay packager is working with the exact same tools as the people bringing the whole system together. not just nixpkgs dx has fallen down the list of priorities, but technical debt down to nix itself has accrued as well. the tvix effort emerged from dissatisfaction with instability (the same dissatisfaction that kept the actual version of nix used in a typical nixos install well behind master) well before any administrative/sponsorship struggle snuggle, and i still maintain that an effort more conservative in scope such as lix would have emerged politics aside, as again, what the end user sees switching to that is mostly "oh hey this random thing that repeated segfaults conditioned me out of attempting just... works now lol?" or various ux papercuts just ceasing to be. nix-at-large has a ways to go but i am optimistic