Sorry, but I don't believe it will get simple. And you can't expect people to believe it is "transitioning" when talking about a 20 year old project. I would love to, but I don't think it's realistic.
I did look into GNU Guix but I discarded it because it looked like it had the same problems, and IIRC did not have build cache.
Direct streaming/downloading doesn't give your IP away (just to the server), torrenting does.