It kinda sounds like your main gripe with Nix is that it's a source-based package manager with transparent binary caching rather than a binary package manager.

It kinda sounds like your main gripe with Nix is that it's a source-based package manager with transparent binary caching rather than a binary package manager. I think that's a mistake, but it's true that Nixpkgs suffers in some places from missing or overlapping abstractions.