Also, the language is quite simple, it's just foreign and you felt more at home with Scheme, so you might not have given Nix as much of a chance. This is the classic "simple vs easy" from the Hickey talk.

Documentation is no perfect, but has become quite a bit better over the years, and many of the problems that still linger are simply architectural ones of the nixpkgs repo, irrespective of language and wouldn't be solved in any other language/DSL in itself.