> When documented examples began steering me towards the still experimental nix flakes

There's a push to make them not be experimental anymore since so much of the community including myself is using them.

flakes are anything but experimental at this point, they've been out for many years and I pretty much use them for everything. you don't have to type those flags if you add them to the configuration file

A newcomer is going to treat anything documented as experimental as that, regardless of what the community thinks; if it's no longer experimental, it needs to be presented as such at all the normal entry points. (None of this is unique to Nix; imagine you needed to start packaging for Windows for some reason.)

This is exactly what I mean. It’s a big put off to see several year old experimental features and other signs that no one is making the decision to move things forward.

If I’m learning something as big as nix with all the facets it has, I don’t also have time to learn it’s entire community history. It’s not a good thing that I need to do that in order to make a decision about how much to trust experimental features of a tool when I’ve not even been using it more than a few hours from the moment of downloading the iso and installing it. It’s a put off to someone new coming to use nix for the first time.