It actually works like a charm. The lack of adoption certainly isn't due to the 'everything is a file' abstraction layer, more because by the time it had been released to the masses the momentum in Unix / Linux was absolutely massive and super hard to overcome. And they in turn were under fire from Windows and Mac on the desktop, which left only an extremely small niche, one that was too small to be viable.

But if you've ever worked with it then you will be longing for exactly those features forever and wondering why we did not manage to take more of its deep insights forward.

A lot of really good ideas have been slaughtered on the altars of commerce and perceived performance improvements. As a result we are still developing software roughly the same way that we did 50 years ago, a model that wasn't ideal but that was good enough.