Thanks for that. I've read up a bit more and I see how you're trying to build a more easily extensible ecosystem. Hope it all get easier to use with time.
I read up a bit more about how to setup a project and the github/local/remote library stuff is very powerful (and not as smooth to setup in lein). I'm wondering about your workflow and how you are mixing and matching local libraries with github and maven/clojar ones. Do you have a separate deps.edn file for local development that point to local "fluid" libraries and then you have periodic freezes where you substitute it for a public deps.edn file and then push it to github/maven?
deps was designed to find a sweet spot in the middle of this with deps defined as data, aliases capturing program executions as data, but builds as programs. As such, the scope is drastically narrowed in deps to just a) building classpaths (by resolving dependency graphs) and b) launching programs.
As such, this tends to be a dramatically simpler model to start with (your initial deps.edn can be empty), and a model that is easy to understand as you scale up. I think there is more to do in how we model "tools" (esp tools shared across projects) and program composites, but nothing prevents you from building these yourself if needed (as you have the full power of Clojure at your disposal).
You can find a pretty comprehensive list of deps.edn tools at https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/Tools