The crisis befalling the Linux kernel is not technical in nature. It is a social crisis. Switching to NetBSD is a technical solution which does not address the root cause of the problem. NetBSD likely has only avoided the slop so far because the project is not economically interesting, but if it evolves into a broadly viable alternative to Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, that interest will materialize and the project will suffer the same fate. It is already concerning that they do not reject slop on ideological grounds. The status quo is that they simply haven't accepted any yet. The gears of co-option are already turning, with the project accepting grants from FUTO for instance. This isn't to say that they are compromised or evil or anything like that, but it is a concern.

The solution to this crisis requires organization. New organizations which embrace a naked antipathy towards capitalism, to seize the mantle which has been abdicated by the sclerotic FSF, SFC, and company. The path forward very well might be NetBSD, or it might be a hard fork of the Linux kernel. The problem of user-space remains, so it is necessary for the movement to be much larger in scope than simply a kernel. Fortunately, I am hearing these concerns voiced by a lot of people who are absolutely dismayed by the trajectory of the Free Software movement.

All that said, I hope you have success. Whether the future lies in NetBSD or Linux, we will need all of the hands to build the alternative. I myself have been checking out NetBSD with interest recently (and other wacky alternatives like Redox OS) for the same reasons, though I haven't been able to boot the installer on my physical machine. (I got it. I had to use a different USB, and I also needed to manually run NetBSD's fsck on the EFI partition I originally created when installing Gentoo a long time ago)

I too am keeping my ear to the ground, to try and see where it might be useful to contribute. I am pretty much only a hobbyist though.