> would love to see a discussion from somebody who really likes Nix on why it isn't ready for prime time yet

The daemon needs to be run as root root in a standard multi-user install which rules out HPC-like envs where Nix would actually shine. There are workarounds but none of them official.

Tooling and documentation are on the same level as for a random esoteric programming language. I love Nix but have been hesitant so far to push it at work despite immense productivity gains.

Similarly to HPC, Nix looks like a perfect match for CI/CD pipelines on the surface. In reality the only easy way to get it done is to use additional non-foss software [1].

[1]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/recommendations-for-introducin...

But does it need to be official? Wouldn't that at the same time bloat nix even more? Isn't it enough if core people of the community for example build https://github.com/nix-community/nix-user-chroot ?

> In reality the only easy way to get it done is to use additional non-foss software

That is not true at all. You can use a nix docker image, a 5 line nix file and 2 commands to do a very basic CI pipeline almost anywhere.