Oh I don't disagree with this at all. The main reason I wouldn't ever actually use plan9 day to day on a desktop, which is to some extent the primary use it was

Oh I don't disagree with this at all. The main reason I wouldn't ever actually use plan9 day to day on a desktop, which is to some extent the primary use it was designed for (well, thin clients workstations really), is that the whole windowing system is just too alien. I think most of the missteps in plan9 are above the "everything is a file" layer though. And while sockets aren't that bad, I do think I would still rather interact with them in the plan9 way than the unix way if I could.