Sorry for the late reply. It's been so long, I've had time to finally start on my own OS!
My OS, Kaph, will attract people interested in "plain English programming" with the Osmosian Order's compiler, modularity, simplicity, and how we can simplify by finding unconventional abstractions. It probably won't be good for people who want a Unix-like system. But! The future tense is very relevant; there's a lot of design work to do and abstractions to find.
I'd like Kaph to be good for people who would like to program but can't deal with the current state of the art -- massive feature sets, alphabetically-ordered documentation, syntax popups, and other things. I know it's impossible to cater to every person's issues. Retrocomputing and fringe Unix developments (like suckless below) are good for many of those people. I'm hitting a somewhat different spot with plain English code.
@thewrongchristian:
Haha! Yeah, I think most of us on the forums would have to say "adventurous users."

Exceptions would be rdos, maybe managarm, and that's all I can think of from currently active forumites. ToaruOS might count, but klange doesn't want it used seriously.
I like your toolkit. Is "COM" Microsoft's Common Object Model? I might look into that for modularity purposes.
@ vvaltchev:
Thanks! Several of your points remind me of
suckless.org, especially these:
vvaltchev wrote:[*] UNIX-like operating systems
[*] minimalistic software that does the job well (but supporting fewer use-cases)
[*] software that favors the small-scale instead of the large scale (N small)
[*] deterministic software that doesn't make guesses and guarantees strict ordering and success or early failure, even when it is less efficient to so (for the average case)
On the other hand, I don't think they do much if any automation testing. Their goals are much less clearly defined.
vvaltchev wrote:[*] software that loves being compatible with pre-existing 3rd party software when possible
This, together with simplicity, always reminds me that the authors of Plan 9 used to say 90% of the code is for interfacing with externally-imposed standards!

But you do you. Plan 9 has the problem that, even with such a large percentage of the OS catering to widely accepted standards, it's still hard to port many programs. The suckless community have known since the late 00s that they could simplify further by switching to Plan 9, but they've chosen to continue developing for POSIX instead.
Kaph is going to have much worse compatibility than Plan 9.

I'll have to really focus on ease of development, but that was pretty-much the goal anyway.