I don't ever remember being 'stuck' with GNU Hurd. It was a "non-product" with a little more evidence of progress than Duke Nukem Forever. Back in those days, I used SunOS (later Solaris), HP-UX, DEC Ultrix, IBM AIX, Tandem Guardian and SGI Irix.
Linux had real improvements over Hurd but it'd be silly to suggest that a separate "Linux" brand kernel needed to exist to make those improvements possible.