Before they worked on Plan 9 they created Unix, that the *nix world lost its way from its simple, small and beautiful roots is clearly something that still pains them greatly.
I would not say that they lost touch with the rest of the world, but that the rest of the world lost touch with them, which has been a great loss.
Things like variable declarations matching the look of how variables are used ('inside out' parsing) are not simple and are responsible for the certain something that makes C work. And Unix was never beautiful, it was always a huge hack.
* Everything is a file (/proc, /net) * UTF-8 * WMII
I suppose that's enough for a research OS and its creators to be successful.