you can at least work around 4 a little bit by having colmena set up the eval and then using nom directly, though you then have to colmena apply afterwards (which evals again). we just have a default.nix with (below, for a non-flake setup), and then use nom build -f . [optional system names]

let
  pins = import ./npins;
  eval = import "${pins.colmena}/src/nix/hive/eval.nix" { rawHive = import ./hive.nix; };
in
eval.toplevel

  nixpkgs.overlays = [
    (_: prev: {
      makeModulesClosure = x: prev.makeModulesClosure (x // { allowMissing = true; });
      pythonPackagesExtensions = prev.pythonPackagesExtensions ++ [
        (_: prev: builtins.listToAttrs (map (name:
          { name = name;
            value = prev.${name}.overridePythonAttrs (_: { doCheck = false; });
          }
        ) [ "dbus-next" "python-can" "curl-cffi" ])
    )];
    })
  ];

In reply to @quadradical:federated.nexus
i didnt even know you can type in spaces