I rather see a reason that many such cancelled projects had very elegant architectures/structures, which is something that hackers love.

If you want to ship a product so that it becomes commercially successful, you often have to "deeply taint" this clear vision to make the product compatible with the multitude of very inelegant (industry) standards that customers expect/require.

Thus the nostalgia is not about shipping vs not shipping, but about keeping an elegant vision or be willing to taint it to be compatible with a "depraved" world.