They are very diverged projects, but share the same philosophy. The Nix packages themselves aren’t the problem, its the organization backing them. So this fork is attempting to create better governance and organization, so that the good underlying tech can keep going and progress.

For example, Flakes have been held back from truly flourishing because the governing body has purposefully held back changes to those systems for nontechnical problems, but rather political conflicts with their proprietary offerings.

Think of the fork the same way we had the Alma/Rocky forks off of CentOS. Its political rather than technical, so keeping the same base tech helps adoption. Over time we can improve or replace parts of the ecosystem as the needs of this new project grow.

I think so. The language (Scheme) is a lot more logical to me, and the higher focus on reproducibility in the main channel compared to Nix (Guix can be bootstrapped from a tiny binary seed) is a draw for me.

Sadly no AFAIK, even ignoring the licensing issues.