With Eelco as a cofounder of DetSys, I feel really excited about where we're going here. I think the world is in many ways primed and ready for Nix, as long as we can help Nix "meet them in the middle."
We're working on making Nix more accessible and producing good and usable, production-ready workflows so teams can just pick it up and go. I'd love to hear what y'all think, to help make sure we're going in the right direction.
I might suggest making a typed superset of Nix, basically adding record types and function signatures. That in itself would be a huge boon for tooling and interacting with nixpkgs. nixpkgs describes a huge and varied meta-API for derivations in various build ecosystems, which makes it hard to use because you ultimately need to dive into source code.