tboettch
I'm not an expert on this, and I could be misunderstanding some subtlety here.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-estate-tax-fili...
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050607-00/?p=...
https://nixos.org/wiki/How_to_install_nix_in_home_(on_anothe...
I've not personally tried it. From reading that document, it seems inconvenient but possible.
My understanding is that the hard-coded paths are needed to ensure compatibility of the binary caches, since store paths are often embedded in other artifacts (e.g. RPATH in binaries, shebang line in scripts). You could always run your own cache using another prefix if that's a problem.
As to the other amendments[2], 203 years is an extreme and unrepresentative outlier. The original bill of rights took a little over 2 years to ratify, and nearly all of the rest have taken under 1.5 years. The only one to take longer than 3 years was the highly controversial 16th amendment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Unit...