Comment by imiric

Right, could be.

One of the insane things with Nix is that the suggested workflow is to manage _everything_ with it. This means that it wants to replace every package manager in existence, so you see Python, Emacs and other dependency trees entirely replicated in Nix. As well as every possible configuration format. It's craziness... Now I don't need to depend on just the upstream package, I also have to wait for these changes to propagate to Nix packages. And sometimes I just want to do things manually as a quick fix, instead of spending hours figuring out why the Nix implementation doesn't work.

So, yeah, having an escape hatch that allows easier integration with other ecosystems or doing things manually in some cases, would be nice to have.