That project seems very interesting! I genuinely believe that nix the language is a huge gatekeeper.
And I’d love to see you keep working on it.
But IMO any nix-like tool without something similar to the nixpkgs stdenv & lib isn’t even comparable. Nixpkgs should be the target. nix is “just” the way we got to it.
I have (sadly?) strong believes that you’ll run into various hard-to-solve issues if you try to go a step further and build a nixpkgs-like project ontop of this (e.g. stuff like lazy evaluation), but I would love to be proven wrong!
Definitively going to read some of your blog posts 