> Anecdotally, I've tried to learn Nix for several years.

Out of interest, what did you find difficult? I ask because I spent last weekend setting up NixOS, and the only things I found difficult were discoverability and documentation (I spent a lot of time just reading through the source code).

Edit: Thinking about it it's very possible that this is just a case of me not knowing what I don't know, since I'm not currently trying to do anything particularly complex.