Right but the people complaining doesn't seem to think that an "underdocumented custom functional programming language", is a design flaw.
So given those assumptions, why don't they fork it?
Also when you say that the value in nix lies in the packages what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean the totality of all the prebuilt and checksummed packages? If you where to fork-fork, and not rebuild nix, wouldn't you still be able to use them? Apart from what is built afterwards?
"The packages" are the "the files describing how to go from source code to an organized filesystem hierarchy containing the useful portions of a particular piece of software". That's the good part of nix, much like it's the good part of the Arch User Repository (AUR), and the BSD Ports system.
I think the people who think the nix language is the valuable part are trying to save it, not fork it. But that's a generalization.
A fork would be able to use nixpkgs even if it didn't use nix-the-language itself, with some careful planning for migration.
So given those assumptions, why don't they fork it?
Also when you say that the value in nix lies in the packages what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean the totality of all the prebuilt and checksummed packages? If you where to fork-fork, and not rebuild nix, wouldn't you still be able to use them? Apart from what is built afterwards?