If you’re using something like niv, you’ve got most of what flakes will bring to the table. I’m in the same boat as you, don’t want to have people enable any experimental feature to get the dev environment going. I use flakes for all my personal stuff though, just because it’s easier than adding the niv dependency and because it comes along with using the new command line interface. I also like that flakes let you specify multiple targets in a single file.