[trentnelson]

Bingo.

Not only that but exploiting NT optimally takes a lot of knowledge about a lot of very low-level kernel details, which you sort of need to make a concerted effort to really learn, which is made harder by no official access to (recent) source code.

So I genuinely think there are just fewer programmers out there that specialize in this sort of stuff. There's definitely a correlation between well-above-the-average programmers trending toward open source contribution, but not really the same level of intellectual curiosity about NT/Windows.

One thing I've noticed is that all the people that grok really low level NT kernel details usually end up as reverse engineering experts.

Oh, except for the OSR internals list, that is usually overflowing with clue (both now and historically).

[pjmlp]

It also requires enjoying programming on Windows and buying all the Microsoft Press books that have tons of healthy information how the whole stack works.

Which doesn't work in the free (as in beer) culture world of modern UNIX.

So only those of us that feel like rewarding the work of others do get the information how everything works.