[mason55]

Wow, a lot to digest here, thanks for the super detailed response! Definitely going to be coming back to this over the next week or two and trying some things out.

> Unfortunately, in the pre-flakes world, you just have to read the Nix code and figure out how to translate things to get the attributes you want into scope

This has been my approach, I always kind of assumed that there must be a better way but at least I feel a little better knowing that there isn't really. I haven't spent much time with flakes because I mostly only use Nix as a package manager/operating system but this helped me see how even if I'm not personally writing packages that I want to re-use I can still get a lot of value from flakes, so getting that setup is probably my next step!