The brief for me would likely be the bureaucracy of it all, and ultimately the power-holding individuals in the NixOS organization being unavailable/passive on improvements.
For more exact painpoints, while reviewing a refactor of buildMavenPackage I noticed an issue in how meta.platforms were defined in openjdk. So wanting to raise this issue, i found that openjdk suprisingly only has a single maintainer listed who has not been active in the openjdk codebase since 2016. While people moving on is natural and completely okay, the understanding that there currently not any one active and available maintainer listed for Java was rather worrisome.
Disucssing this on Matrix was received with several messages in the shape of “that’s not great” from influential people inside nixpkgs, but I was ultimately advised to look at picking up openjdk as a new maintainer and help refactor it.
While I definitely could, but, it left me feeling yet again like I am somehow needing to be responsible for yet another huge chunk of nixpkgs. And whatever refactors I would end up creating, I fear that the PR of that would end up left open. As ultimately, nobody seems in charge or available.
Further issues would include the withdrawn status of the Nix Flakes RFC without any way for the community to get it pushed past its “forever experimental” stage that it has been permanently put in. Other issues are PRs in nixpkgs I have watched, for, a, long, time.