It's sad though - there's almost nothing in Nix (in my experience) that has to be that difficult if you know any programming. It's a perfect storm of bad documentation, bad tooling and unintuitive UX.

I've been half tempted to try and bridge Nix with some simplified UX. Something resembling blasphemy but nonetheless focused on user experience above all else. At least doing that would be a natural project to learn Nix better, too heh.

(disclaimer: I use Nix[OS] on two machines and my macbook. I know it decently.. but far from where i'd expect given it's my primary OS and package manager)