The flip side of this is that it takes control out of the kernel teams grasp and, as a result, causes a lot of finger pointing. At least now you can say "Kernel

The flip side of this is that it takes control out of the kernel teams grasp and, as a result, causes a lot of finger pointing. At least now you can say "Kernel team, this is broke, fix it" and someone is responsible. The architecture you are proposing allows everyone to hem and haw and otherwise pass the buck. There are similar problems in Firefox. Blame the extensions, not the browser. API or none, bad programmers can get their code to affect a lot of people. Of course, if you want to reduce bloat, compile your own kernel. Get rid of the modules you don't need. Is that a lot different that what you propose?