I agree with the point of your argument, and everything you’ve said, except:
> who are trying to not break their own users by removing or stalling a popular package they already had
I don’t believe this is true. I believe the author asked to not be included before the change got merged. After the PR got closed, the maintainer from nixos took the conversation to the homeassistant forums, where someone seemingly representing nixos indicated that packaging homeassistant was a relatively new effort.
If that is true I apologize, however when the issue blew up I looked and it did appear that home assistant was already used by Nix users. If I get a chance before the edit window I will take a look and adjust this point accordingly.
edit: I looked into it and it appears home-assistant has been packaged in Nixpkgs since at least January 2018. I'm keeping this statement as-is. (Also, to clarify to anyone reading this, the PR that spurred this on was one for a dependency for home-assistant, not home-assistant itself, but the author of the dependency is one of the top contributors to home-assistant.)
> who are trying to not break their own users by removing or stalling a popular package they already had
I don’t believe this is true. I believe the author asked to not be included before the change got merged. After the PR got closed, the maintainer from nixos took the conversation to the homeassistant forums, where someone seemingly representing nixos indicated that packaging homeassistant was a relatively new effort.