Comment by FRidh

This is indeed not very good. Note there is a reason that overridePythonAttrs exists: it overrides the call to buildPythonPackage instead of mkDerivation. There is/was an RFC on standardizing overriding in Nixpkgs but it got stuck. I think for these things to improve what is really necessary is funding to improve Nixpkgs. These kind of issues are fairly hard to solve as they span multiple ecosystems and require coordination.