Yes - Putting UNIX on a pedestal means that it is basically correct and you just need additions rather than looking at it and saying that UNIX does this badly or even incorrectly and so make incompatabler chnages to improve things.
I think part of the issue is that unix does some things correctly (everything is a file comes to mind) and that implementing them without implementing the rest of unix just means you've made a unix-like that's not compatible with normal unix, as opposed to making something new and using the good parts of things you encouter.