Right.
Linus made a Unix clone. One can say, started with the wrong premise.
It's a lot of work. I honestly think what Emacs developers are doing - assume that the underlying OS won't ever be good enough, and just put all your ideology into particular environment you're making, - is the right approach. I'm not even sure if what I'd want to do requires anything but Emacs, I think I'll get busy with learning elisp.