Yes, I've messed with it (most recently in a virtual machine about a year ago). But then again, in the same time-frame I've also "messed with" Plan9, BeOS-recreation Haiku, and several other oddballs.

Hurd works, but then again so do a lot of other things. I very much like the philosophy of micro-kernels and everything-else-implemented-by-a-server, but in practice (perhaps just because of unlucky timing combined with performance penalties) that hasn't (yet?) caught on.

(I used the Debian distribution.)