[Analemma_]

For what it's worth, this is exactly how most Operating Systems courses in undergraduate CS work, so it definitely seems like many different smart people have converged on this as the right way to go. At least in my course, we did build a toy OS by the end of the semester, but it was rigorously divided projects for the individual subsystems in isolation: write the pre-emptive scheduler, write the networking layer, write the filesystem, etc. A modern OS is an incredibly complex beast and trying to grasp it all at once is just going to lead to madness.