This is fundamentally why plan9 didn't take off. It was too different and not better enough.
Platform technology marketing is being on the right side of a nuanced dichotomy:
1. You need to be different enough to be noticed and given attention 2. And better in the eye of the user (which implies familiar)
For example, OSX was a great success among hacker types for this very reason: It was different yet familiar (Most UNIX-y stuff just worked on OSX thanks to its FreeBSD lineage).
Another example is Go: It's different enough from the previous generation of server-side languages to command attention, but its syntax was very much in the C language tradition (And it articulated its "betterness" well, such as performance gain over Python/Ruby and ease of use over C/C++/Java).
Fundamentally, Plan9 was way too different from the incumbent without any clear advantage.