[yachtintransit]

I agree with your sentiment regarding innovation is driven by a fee individuals. the good news is that its not about how high the bar is. you Don't need to compete on legacy metrics, you just need to do something that that the other system could never ( or at least with great difficulty ) do. another great thing about os's is they are really not that big once you take out all the vendor fragmentation from different device drivers.

you could really narrow things down by just targeting a specific hardware set set ( like a raspberryPi ). Actually now that I said it, that's the only hw I would target . reduced footprint , experimental user group , arm architecture. its the perfect platform to launch a 'different ' kind of os.