The Answer to the Original Issue

If channels were to be removed, it would be more clearer to everybody including new users, what the real use and power of nix is, and all documentation would go straight to pinning. Then only after understanding this, can people write higher level abstract tools to provide an auto-updating "channel" like interface to the underlying pinning concept.

One effect of this is that you get reproducibility. Note that this is not binary reproducibility, since it's still possible for the compilation of code to give different resulting binaries. But it is reproducibility within the context of Nix universe.

No pinning isn't about which channels you get. Pinning pins to a content addressed commit hash of nixpkgs or any nixpkgs even your own fork. Channels is orthogonal and probably a mistake and should be removed.

with import <nixpkgs> {};

{ pkgs ? import (fetchTarball https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/3590f02e7d5760e52072c1a729ee2250b5560746.tar.gz) {};
}:
# ...

with import <nixpkgs> {};

{ pkgs ? import (fetchTarball https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/3590f02e7d5760e52072c1a729ee2250b5560746.tar.gz) {};
}:
# ...

with import <nixpkgs> {};

{ pkgs ? import (fetchTarball https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/3590f02e7d5760e52072c1a729ee2250b5560746.tar.gz) {};
}:
# ...