From talking with some people who were witnesses to earliest days of Hurd (but not involved in the project), the real problems of Hurd were social not technical

From talking with some people who were witnesses to earliest days of Hurd (but not involved in the project), the real problems of Hurd were social not technical - if anything, OSF/1 & NeXTSTEP succeeding from similar code base (for some value of) points that it was possible to do it. The story goes that the early days were dominated by some ridiculously bad project management that makes Cathedral and the Bazaar era "Cathedral" a nice and well maintained project. Most importantly, GNU Hurd lacked the "ecological niche" to drive work towards it because it couldn't deliver enough, just like lack of information about 386BSD led to Linux (Linus explicitly said that if he had known about 386BSD, he would have worked on it and maybe forked it)