I love declarative reproducible systems in theory and figure they'll hit the sweet spot 90 percent of the time, though I'm not 100 percent sure they'll fix all my issues, as I tend to do horrifying things like making one system's dynamic linker aware of another system's set of libraries (crossing distro boundaries is ill advised, but doable after forcing yourself to read up on how ld works), and other daft things like that. Was distro hopping for a bit, and have settled on something I like, just need to unite all the other things into a single overarching system image.
Obviously, this would require me going one-man package maintainer for doing this, and I'm reluctant to start, because I see the value of these package management techniques everyone settled upon, and I'm just trying to figure out the right way to store everything.
Basically, I'm nuts, I do horrible things with linkers in the name of "screw it, I can't break it any worse" and I have an update turnaround time worse than Slackware.
I figure give it a couple years and the stubbornness will be broken through.
You can say I'm doing it wrong for not going with the flow, but at the end of the day, in a world with ever increasing abstractive opaqueness, somebody has to carry forward a nuts n' bolts understanding of what all of this madness is built on.