For inspiration, have a look at the plan 9 syscall table:

http://aiju.de/plan_9/plan9-syscalls

This is how you make a simple yet flexible OS. Use an rpc protocol to do all the talking to objects within the system which are exposed as files. It's very REST like and allows any programming language to interact with those objects by reading/writing them as files. So you have a very uniform interface that eliminates a lot of binaries as now simple scripts can handle the work of reading and writing those files. Then realize that you can easily export those files to other machines on a lan or the internet. So the tcp stack of an internet facing machine can be exported and mounted on multiple machines who now all talk to the internet via that one machines tcp stack. And that can even be done across the net to bypass "great firewalls". Bye bye nat.