While there are definitely a lot of remaining documentation and usability issues with Nix as it stands today, the core model is far from 'overengineered' - if anything, it's orders of magnitude less complex than the organically-grown cobbled-together pile of tools and conventions that 'traditional' distros are made out of.
Nix having a well-defined, complete, specified-upfront, coherent model doesn't make it 'overengineered'; it just means that the tools were designed from the start to help you manage the complexity of system management, rather than just kind of leaving it implicit and letting the end user and/or packager deal with the fallout later through an ever-growing collection of workarounds and patches and scripts.
It's completely valid to decide that NixOS is not (yet) for you due to the learning curve that still exists; I frequently warn people away from NixOS (when they are not prepared to deal with that) for this precise reason. But please don't conflate that with 'bad design'.
While there are definitely a lot of remaining documentation and usability issues with Nix as it stands today, the core model is far from 'overengineered' - if anything, it's orders of magnitude less complex than the organically-grown cobbled-together pile of tools and conventions that 'traditional' distros are made out of.
Nix having a well-defined, complete, specified-upfront, coherent model doesn't make it 'overengineered'; it just means that the tools were designed from the start to help you manage the complexity of system management, rather than just kind of leaving it implicit and letting the end user and/or packager deal with the fallout later through an ever-growing collection of workarounds and patches and scripts.
It's completely valid to decide that NixOS is not (yet) for you due to the learning curve that still exists; I frequently warn people away from NixOS (when they are not prepared to deal with that) for this precise reason. But please don't conflate that with 'bad design'.