> So you do care about how many rubies you have

No, I care about how many leftover rebuilds I have that I no longer use (typically all of them). Couldn't care less about any individual packages because I leave it to Nix to know what should be installed and what shouldn't.

I don't casually browse through the stores because I have no reason to.

> So you were just arguing for the fun of it based on a superficial theory?

Arguing? That's not what I'm doing, but maybe it's how you feel. Your initial post was a question. I replied to it. I guess your question was rhetorical, based on your responses to my comments.

I was giving you my perspective.

My various dealings with the paths comes from various adventures of debugging why my configs didn't produce what I thought (eg things not in path). It's also probably why I see the relationship as starting with config and ending with path on disk.

I have never gone on fishing expeditions around store paths. When I go out of my homedir and "root" fs, I know what hash I want from looking at a symlink, or some log output.