OTOH I want to encourage those who do have the time and inclination to get involved and improve those things and help reify the good ideas / fulfill their potential.
I really wish this was written in something even like Haskell or Ocaml, that has actual real language support and tooling. Troubleshooting attribute errors was just not possible and I gave up (GUIX looks awesome, but I can't really use shepherd unfortunately).
It really says something when I found myself looking to Gentoo as an "easier, well-thought-out alternative"...
The 3 times I've tried to use Nix (and invariably gave up), I always came to this conclusion.
A language like F#/OCaml with great typing and type inference and good auto completion could get us half the way to usability.
Adopting NixOS means learning how everything fits together as well as learning the quirks of a not very intuitive language. Way too make adoption even harder for everyone on the fence.
There's nothing "Haskell-like" in it as far as I can see.
And its real problem, just like with Javascript, is that it suffers from a serious case of roll-your-own-framework syndrome.
If you mean that it doesn't come with the vanilla Linux kernel: just add the nonguix channel and you can install it.