[moojd]

Exactly this. One of the first things I tell people struggling with nix is that nix is simple and almost all of the complexity lives in nixpkgs. Knowing where to look for help (is this a nix, flakes, NixOS, or nixpkgs thing?) is one of the hardest problems for beginners.

Nixpkgs specifically needs to be entirely rethought. It has become too large and complex to manage both technically and politically with the number of contributors. Separating out the lib, stdenv/tooling, and package definitions would be a good start.