Your statement is incredibly handwavy. GNU userland was doomed because the programmers were not professionals? Apart from the fact that many of the programmers

Your statement is incredibly handwavy. GNU userland was doomed because the programmers were not professionals? Apart from the fact that many of the programmers were actually professionals, what were the design decisions that were made, keeping in mind that much of the userland design is essentially governed by posix. Also if I look at many of the "professional" unixes userland tools I'd choose GNU userland any day, because the userland tools are incredibly handicapped, e.g. name one Solaris (or even better hp ux) core userland tool that is better than it's GNU equivalent.