I think only the Plan 9 people have got the idea so far.
The problem that has shot us as a race is that in the 1990s, technology became suddenly ubiquitous and whatever was lying around was glued together to fill a niche which took off before people had a chance to think about it and engineer something sound. An analogy perhaps:
As a biologist, I've got to point out that our entire existence is based on evolution gluing together whatever was around to fill a niche, without thinking about proper engineering. Which is why, to give just one example, the nerves in our eyes run in front of the light sensitive cells, necessitating a blind spot where the nerve leaves the eye.
More seriously, I think we as humans benefit much more from getting technological developments quickly, than we would by waiting years or decades for them to be soundly engineered first. I doubt we can even foresee all the possible problems until we start using things at a large scale.
Good point. A valid counterexample would be the well though out text book examples of minix (and gnu hurd) vs Linux.
Sometimes paralysis by analysis is a bigger problem than bugs and bad architecture. And often the alternative to "usable" isn't "perfect" but "never shipped".
The problem that has shot us as a race is that in the 1990s, technology became suddenly ubiquitous and whatever was lying around was glued together to fill a niche which took off before people had a chance to think about it and engineer something sound. An analogy perhaps:
http://megaswf.com/s/2529389/